Secret money flooding election campaigns drowns voice of we the people

Bernero vs. Snyder, Little in common from 2 candidates for state governor

Davis, Langford Morris are labor’s picks for state Supreme Court

The campaign’s homestretch: Labor’s legions vs. corporate cash

Buffed and beautiful: iconic powerhouse shines in re-use

Construction still struggles for momentum

NEWS BRIEFS

Secret money flooding election campaigns drowns voice of we the people

By Robert Reich
Fmr. U.S. Secretary of Labor

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding Tea Party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates – without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission (January, 2010) made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.

Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.

Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut. There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed.

Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.

Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway – subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.

Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes. It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)

There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy – a government by and for the rich and big corporations.

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Bernero vs. Snyder, Little in common from 2 candidates for state governor

By Melissa Preddy
The Center for Michigan

With the campaign entering the stretch run, gubernatorial candidates Virg Bernero and Rick Snyder are amping up their very different messages about how to return the state to economic prosperity.

Republican Snyder says he’ll use his own business experience to create the climate that helps companies thrive and Michiganians find work. Democrat Bernero, who is Lansing’s mayor, touts a pro-business record as his city’s CEO but also promises to knock heads when businesses behave badly, which he says some banks are doing in refusing to ease up on foreclosures.

Regardless of who is elected on Nov, 2, the economy will clearly be job one. Michigan’s 13.1 percent unemployment rate is second only to Nevada. About a third of residential housing sales this year are the result of foreclosures, according to latest figures, and by some accounts there may be a backlog of more than half a million foreclosures yet to hit the market.

The state’s poverty rate of 14 percent is the highest in 16 years, according to Census Bureau figures, meaning about 1.4 million Michiganians live on the equivalent of $22,000 a year for a family of four. Tens of thousands will max out of jobless benefits in coming months, and more people in the state are without health insurance compared to the years just before the recession hit.

Lawmakers can’t scrounge up the dollars to fully fund the successful “Pure Michigan” tourism campaign, which has cancelled fall and winter advertising. And the state’s most visible jobs creation initiative in recent years, a tax credit aimed at luring filmmakers, has been found to cost the state twice as much as it brings in, according to a recent Senate Fiscal Agency report.

Voters on Nov. 2 won’t be likely to confuse the two candidates’ strategies, analysts say.

“On one hand you have an individual who has never held elective office. But he has an extensive track record as a business person,” said Patrick Anderson, founder of the East Lansing consulting firm Anderson Economic Group.

“On the other hand you have a labor-oriented Democrat with elected office experience. People looking at a prospective governor will consider not just their position papers but their track record and campaign rhetoric.
And these are two starkly different choices.”

Different experience, differing strategies.

The candidates’ backgrounds and experience reflect their divergent approaches to stimulating growth in Michigan. As might be expected, Bernero, a former Democratic state senator in his second term as mayor of Lansing, espouses a more hands-on and targeted approach than his Republican rival, Rick Snyder.

Bernero is a staunch union advocate who’s made headlines – and a name for himself as “America’s angriest mayor” – for defending the state’s manufacturing workers on cable television after worker wages were slammed during industry bailout hearings. His position paper includes a bullet item, “stand up for Michigan manufacturing,” and he advocates tax incentives for export-oriented manufacturing.

He’s also homed in on ‘green’ advances as a way of reshaping the state’s manufacturing, keying off what he says is his previous success in obtaining federal funding to clean up defunct General Motors factories. Bernero says he’ll designate ‘Green Manufacturing Zones’ to create jobs in sectors like wind power, electric battery and new vehicle technology.

Bernero’s website also says he favors the International Business Zone concept already implemented in Lansing; it offers permanent U.S. residency to foreign nationals who invest at least $50,000 in a venture that creates 10 jobs; the candidate says he’d work to get the same incentives in place in all of Michigan’s major cities.

Snyder, on the other hand, has spoken out against industry-specific tax incentives like the film making credits, and also criticizes efforts to target “winners and losers” in attempts to lure business to the state.

His business development philosophy revolves around an overhaul of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which he initially chaired when it was formed in 1999. He claims that since his tenure, the MEDC has been politicized and has strayed from its original mission of encouraging long-term growth to a focus on quick hits using incentives and credits.

“The state currently gives out $6.3 billion more in tax credits, deductions and incentives than it takes in yearly in tax revenue – more than $30 billion a year in handouts that are supposed to be stimulating our economy,” Snyder told the Associated Press. “Economic development incentives should be used sparingly and measured against the actual number of targeted jobs created to make the data more reliable and less subjective. The results should be posted online for everyone to see. The MEDC should focus on economic ‘gardening’ (described on his website as policies to help existing small businesses and entrepreneurs) instead of ‘hunting.’”

Anderson, whose firm has authored studies critical of targeted tax breaks, said the gyrations can be just as much of a turnoff. In de-emphasizing incentives, “if you are a potential investor in the state. You know you are less likely to get a specific tax credit but you are likely to have a government that takes seriously the concerns of investors and entrepreneurs,” he said. “It does make the climate more predictable for businesses.”

Bill Ballenger, publisher of the Inside Michigan Politics newsletter, agreed that the incentives are a dual-edged sword. “Some Michigan businesses are very angry – they say, ‘we’ve been here for years and we got nothing,’” he noted. “But some Hollywood person comes here and you give him a handout.”

Taxing questions.

The candidates also seek to differentiate themselves on taxes; Snyder wants to eliminate the Michigan Business Tax – which taxes income and gross receipts – in favor of a flat 6 percent corporate income tax. He concedes, however, that the 6 percent figure is a goal and may not be enough to adequately support needed services.

Bernero claims the 6 percent tax will actually be a hike for some small businesses; he wants to roll back the 22 percent surcharge and says he will work to reform the MBT. “Yes we need to reform the tax system, but not with a regressive system,” he said in his Oct. 10 debate with Snyder. Bernero’s plan also relies on tax incentives for research and development in the state; he calls the incentives “important job creation tools.”

Neither campaign is too clear on the details of its tax plan; Snyder hasn’t said how he’d make up the shortfall created by his $1.5 billion “tax break for Michigan’s job providers.”

It’s the economy, stupid.

In many ways, almost all of each candidate’s campaign-trail rhetoric is connected one way or the other to jobs and the economy. Social issues like abortion and gay marriage are on the back burner this cycle and even quality-of-life issues like roads aren’t getting the attention they often do.

Bernero has garnered headlines calling for a moratorium on foreclosure sales and making a confrontational appearance at the Detroit Economic Club on Oct. 7, when he blasted banks that aren’t easing up on foreclosures and threatened to withdraw state money from such institutions.

“If you are part of the problem, if you are part of the Wall Street breed, then you will have a problem with Bernero,” the Detroit News quoted him as saying. “Consider yourself on notice.”

The aggressive anti-banking stance was in line with Bernero’s “Main Street” agenda and his proposal for a state-run bank that would remove the state’s funds from large for-profit institutions and also be more proactive in community and small-business lending.

The bank would “partner with local Michigan lenders – not compete with them – to help them make more private sector loans to Michigan businesses,” Bernero says on his website. “This single act will help break the credit crunch for businesses, allowing our entrepreneurs to create hundreds of thousands of Michigan jobs.”

Analysts have pretty much dismissed the idea of the state-run bank.

“It’s been a long-standing populist notion, but having the state invest in businesses is specifically prohibited by the state constitution,” said Anderson, who served as deputy budget director under Gov. John Engler.

Both men have said they hope the divisive right-to-work issue doesn’t come up if they’re elected. And when it comes to jobs, both have been flinging hyperbole. Democratic ads tout the mayor’s jobs creation and accuse Snyder of being an outsourcing jobs-cutter while GOP ads blame Bernero for double-digit unemployment.

The truth is somewhat murky on both sides.

Analysts say it’s absurd to blame Bernero for recession-driven jobless figures. But they also doubt the mayor’s claims – which his campaign failed to substantiate despite multiple requests – that he’s created or sustained as many as 6,000 jobs in Lansing.

August figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show Lansing’s unemployment rate is greater than 10 percent, higher than Ann Arbor’s 8.8 percent and about on par with Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

“The part of Bernero’s track record that establishes a small basis for arguing he has the experience and aptitude for growing business is his record as mayor of Lansing,” said Anderson. “He has been reasonably effective at engaging the business community, and also very effecting at arguing to political leaders nationally that maintaining a domestic auto industry is in everyone’s best interest.”

But Ballenger scoffs at the jobs-creation claims. “Maybe he used tax credits available to municipal governments to retain jobs at firms that may have left Lansing, or to lure a firm that might have located elsewhere,” said Ballenger. “I haven’t seen any details, and it’s about impossible to prove or disprove. But if you watched his ads you would think Lansing is this full-employment Mecca.”

Snyder, aside from his stint as chief executive of computer-maker Gateway Inc., runs the Ann Arbor-based venture capital firm Ardesta, raising $200 million in funding, and helped found SPARK, the area business development incubator. Snyder claims on his website that 33 companies nurtured by SPARK in 2009 plan to hire more than 2,100 workers.

Each candidate has a distinct skill set to offer citizens and the business community, if elected. Analysts say neither campaigner is likely to offer more details before the election. And even after Nov. 2, when the name of the next governor is known, voters should manage their expectations, Ballenger said. “Is there anything a governor can do single-handedly to turn things around?” asked Ballenger. “No, and the sooner we recognize that, the better off we will be. The best thing a governor can do is come in and create a different climate – and then catch a really big break.”

Davis, Langford Morris are labor’s picks for state Supreme Court

By Mark Gaffney
Michigan AFL-CIO

The Michigan Supreme Court race is arguably the most important race in the state this year –and always. Justices of the Michigan Supreme Court are arguably the most important elected officials in the state. Justices of the state Supreme Court make the final call on Congressional and Legislative redistricting.  The last time Michigan underwent redistricting the GOP-controlled Supreme Court severely gerrymandered our state, radically redrawing lines so that Michigan lost three Democratic congressional districts and gained two GOP districts. (Michigan went from 9-7 Democratic to 9-6 Republican in the congressional districts).

The same is true for legislative elections: over 55% of MI voters voted for the Democrat in the State Senate races in 2006 yet the Republicans still control it 21-17.

How you vote is a personal decision. Based on the record the Michigan State AFL-CIO recommends Incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Alton Thomas Davis and Judge Denise Langford Morris for the Michigan Supreme Court. Please remember to cast your vote Tuesday, November 2^nd. 

Meet the candidates: This fall working families across Michigan have the opportunity to elect not one but two great candidates to the Michigan Supreme Court. Incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Alton Thomas Davis and Judge Denise Langford Morris know the critical role the bench plays in the preservation of our rights. Together they will use their over 50 years of combined experience upholding Justice, Equality, and Fairness to weigh in on some of the most important issues of our time. 

Justice Alton Thomas Davis grew up working on his grandfather's farm in Northern Michigan. He was able to apply his tough work ethic learned on the farm to his studies in college at Western Michigan.  Justice Davis spent many years working in public schools before deciding to pursue his passion for the Law and earning his law degree at the Detroit College of Law. 

Davis worked in private practice in Northern Michigan before becoming a prosecutor where he put murders and sex offenders behind bars.  He served on the 46^th Circuit Court for 21 years, including 17 as Chief Judge, before moving on the Michigan Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court.

Davis, who has been praised by both Democrats and Republicans for his fairness and honesty, has led the effort to streamline and reform Michigan's judicial system.  He says that we have too many judges that have predetermined agendas, so he will be a fair and impartial judge committed to a professional and courteous court that is open to all the people of Michigan.

Judge Denise Langford Morris has served on the Oakland County Circuit Court for 18 years, making her the longest-serving woman on the bench and the first African-American to be elected county-wide in Oakland. Langford Morris put herself through Wayne State and law school at Detroit Mercy.  She was appointed to the court by Gov. Engler after working as an investigator for the state department of child protective services and then serving as a state and federal prosecutor where she has a record of putting murders and sex offenders behind bars.  

Langford Morris has a wealth of experience, having tried over 50,000 cases including high-profile criminal cases and complex civil litigation.  She says that the court has become unbalanced against the people of Michigan and she will use her 25 years of experience to return fairness, integrity, independence and compassion to the bench.

Meet the Opposition:

Justice Robert Young –up for re-election in 2010 —is infamous for being an activist jurist with an anti-consumer, pro-big business, pro-insurance agenda. Young is a former insurance company executive who shares radical, far-right Tea-Party political views with Kentucky’s Rand Paul and has told audiences he believes that Brown v. Board of Education –the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation—was “wrongly decided.” 

Young is one of only 10 of the more than 400 state Supreme Court Justices in the U.S. to choose to weigh in to defend infamous mine owner Don Blankenship and Massey Coal (owner of the notorious Upper Big Branch Mine) in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Blankenship had lost a $50 million court case in West Virginia and responded by almost single-handedly buying the election of a state Supreme Court Justice in that state, who promptly overturned the verdict against Blankenship. 

When the case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, Young signed on to the friend of the court brief arguing that there was nothing wrong with what Blankenship had done.  Even the very conservative US Supreme Court disagreed, and ruled against Young and Blankenship’s Massey Coal.

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The campaign’s homestretch: Labor’s legions vs. corporate cash

By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI) – With the 2010 election campaign down to its final days, the contest – for workers and their allies – has become one of labor’s legions versus corporate cash.

And the unanswered questions in all this are (a) How many unionists will turn out and how enthusiastically, for pro-worker candidates and (b) How much more money, hidden behind front groups, can business and the Radical Right pump into congressional campaigns, bamboozling voters with a blizzard of negative ads?

The stakes in the contest are high. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who would lose that post should the GOP-business onslaught take hold of the House, told the Steelworkers’ Women of Steel conference that the Democratic-run Congress and the Obama administration have a lot of unfinished business.

Headlining it is “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs,” she said. But it also includes creation of a strategy to revive U.S. manufacturing, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act – to level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining – and enacting “clean energy,” on jobs, anti-global warming and national security grounds.

All those and more pro-worker measures would be in jeopardy or dead if Democrats lost one or both houses of Congress, analysts say. That’s where labor comes in. Pelosi told other progressive groups, whom she blasted for not ponying up campaign cash, that she depends on them for dollars, but on labor for foot soldiers.

That’s not to say that labor is completely staying off the airwaves, unlike the GOP and its business and Radical Right backers. But most of labor’s money – even where one union (SEIU) plans to spend $44 million and another (AFSCME) plans to spend $56 million – will go to mobilizing members and their families, friends and allies.

One of the few unions to announce a large ad buy was the non-affiliated National Education Association, which is spending $15 million on ads for a few selected congressional races where education is a key issue. But a memo from AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman, distributed to union presidents early in October and released on the Internet last week, outlines the scope of labor’s ground game. She says 75 House Democratic seats are “in play” including 37 with high union density. Her mobilizing report showed:

* Union volunteers have given out 17.5 million leaflets and talked to workers one-on-one at over 4,000 worksites. They made over 23.6 million phone calls and knocked on more than 1.3 million doors. Unions sent out 18.6 million pieces of direct mail through early October. The secretary-treasurer of the West Virginia AFL-CIO says there will be at least eight mailings there.

“Mail is much more effective among union members” than voters overall, Ackerman said. “They see it as a communication from a trusted source, their union, which they want to read. Our testing shows union members spend much more time reading the pieces, and retain more information from them, than the public does.”

* National unions released 2,000 staffers from national and state headquarters – the AFL-CIO building in D.C. is practically empty – to work with 3,000 local coordinators and “support tens of thousands of union volunteers each day who are undertaking this grassroots work” to reach 17 million people, unionists and their household members.

* Two large labor-affiliated groups also put legions in the field. Working America, the fed’s affiliate for people who won’t – or can’t – join unions, “is talking to their 3.2 million members about jobs and the economy, door knocking over 25,000 households a week.” And the Alliance for Retired Americans is reaching its 4 million members by phone banks and town halls “about the dangers we face from Right Wing plans to privatize Social Security.” Both groups also got AFL-CIO direct mail.

Contrast labor’s ground troops with the big business ad blitz, often hidden behind front groups which do not have to disclose their donors. The non-partisan website OpenSecrets.org reports that as of Oct. 19, so-called “independent expenditures” in the off-year election – by all sides – totaled $194.6 million, or almost three times as much as in the 2006 off-year election ($68.8 million).

That figure is undoubtedly low.  With just three unions planning $115 million in spending, and the Chamber of Commerce alone planning to spend an equal sum, total spending on the election could reach into the billions, including spending by candidates and party committees.

Besides the political party committees, the top outside spender as of Oct. 19 was the Chamber ($22.9 million), more than twice the figure of the top union spender (SEIU, at $10.6 million), OpenSecrets reported.

“There are strict legal limits that help make our political efforts transparent,” SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette told a political blogger.

“To the extent we do political work funded by our general treasury, most of it is member-to-member work funded by and accountable to those same low-wage workers. We don't – and can't – solicit contributions from non-members. And of course it is disclosed,” Ringuette said.

“The Chamber and the shadowy 527 and (c)4 groups that have sprung up after Citizens United” – the Supreme Court decision which opened the doors for corporate campaign cash –  “are conduits for undisclosed corporate money, pure and simple.” Ringuette says the High Court ruling is “more aptly called ‘Corporations United.”

“We are a union of working people, and the money we spend on politics is money donated by workers. Their (the Chamber’s) attempt to liken us to them in this regard is at best ignorant and frankly wrong,” she declared.

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Buffed and beautiful: iconic powerhouse shines in re-use

By Marty Mulcahy
Managing Editor

LANSING – In an era dominated by cost-friendly, steel-framed and glass-walled tower construction, the Accident Fund’s headquarters building, currently under renovation, will continue to stand out as a beautiful architectural throwback gracing the city’s skyline – and will surely be among the most substantial office buildings in the nation.

Formerly the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s Ottawa Street Power Station, the powerhouse was constructed in 1939 along the Grand River to provide electricity and heat to businesses in downtown Lansing. It’s still a landmark, but its industrial days are over. When we last visited the building 18 months ago, the building trades were in the process of completely shelling out the cavernous building. Since that time, the trades fit and finished nine steel and concrete floors, and are in the process of creating office space for the Accident Fund, which is moving its headquarters into the building.

“After we tore everything out, we found we had a very plumb building, and it was in surprisingly good shape,” said Chad Teeples, senior project manager for Christman Co., which is acting as general contractor on the project. Walls on the lower part of the building consist of 14 inches of masonry. The massive thickness of the concrete floor of the building provided a solid anchorage for the power plant’s turbines. “The iron workers found the entire building was only three-quarters of an inch, to an inch out of plumb in nine stories, and that’s not too bad for its age,” he added. “This is a very, very solid building.”

Luring the Accident Fund Insurance Company of America headquarters to the former powerhouse is a triumph for the City of Lansing. The city had tried for nearly a decade to find a use for the building. The plant went dead in the late 1980s, when steam and power production were transferred to nearby Eckert Station. Then in 2001, a looped chilled water system was installed in part of the building to provide cooling to buildings in the downtown business district. That production system has been torn out and placed elsewhere.

In 2008, the Accident Fund announced it would move its employees from its current headquarters building a few blocks away and fund a $182 million renovation of the former power plant. The work will yield 333,000 square feet of office space, including the renovated building and a four-story North Annex. A six-level, 1,000-spot parking deck was also constructed as part of the project. Today, the Christman Co. and about 210 Hardhats are getting the building ready for a mid-April, 2011 move-in by the Accident Fund.

“We’ve worked over 600,000 total man-hours, and have gone 700 days without a lost-time accident,” Teeples said. “Everybody here has done a good job.”

Now that the work of the trades has progressed to the point where the building’s interior has the look and feel of an office building, the main challenge coming up is meeting the schedule. But Teeples said perhaps the most difficult part of the job took place in the beginning, when structural steel to build-out the interior of the building had to be lowered in via crane through the ceiling, and then carted into place by Douglas Steel iron workers.  More than 8,900 pieces of steel were set in that fashion. “We called in ship-in-a-bottle construction,” Teeples said. “It was quite a feat.”

Another challenge is making the building energy efficient. Insulation was added to the walls where it was possible. From boilers and chillers in the basement, heating and cooling will be distributed through under-floor plenums on each level of the building. The main concern was heat loss through the building’s massive window area – some 38,000 square-feet of old single pane glass was replaced with double-paned insulated glass.

Besides the glass and a good cleaning, little had changed about the exterior of the Ottawa Street Station, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

Its description reads: “The Ottawa Street Power Station, located at 217 E. Ottawa St. along the Grand River, has been one of the downtown skyline’s most distinguishing features since it was built in 1939 by the Lansing Board of Water and Light. The power station was designed in the distinctive Art Deco style, and is significant for both its grandeur and its role in providing electricity and steam heat to downtown Lansing from 1939 until the late 1980s. Besides the Michigan Capitol dome itself, the power station – with its broad base, stepped arch windows and metal doors, blocky tower form and graded-hue masonry – is one of the capital city’s most visually dominating structures.”

Founded in 1912, the Accident Fund and is one of the nation’s leading workers compensation insurers with more than $3 billion in assets. Its parent company is Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. When the move was announced, Elizabeth R. Haar, Accident Fund president and CEO, said the firm was committing long-term to the City of Lansing, the State of Michigan and the people of mid-Michigan. “We are here in Michigan to stay, we are growing jobs here and we are stating to the nation that Michigan is a great place to do business,” she said.

The Accident Fund said the redevelopment would be “the largest adaptive reuse of a historic power plant in the state.” Christman Co.’s information on the project pointed out that the exterior of the building has a number of distinctive features incorporated by Bowd-Munson, who were renowned architects of the period. These features include a stepped roofline, building and windows shaped to represent a stylized plume of fire, and exterior building colors symbolizing the combustion of coal, starting with black granite at the base, giving way to purple grey in the lower masonry, and continuing to red and yellow bricks that lighten in hue as the "flame" rises.

“This is great economic news for Lansing and Michigan, and another demonstration of our corporate commitment to Michigan,” said Daniel J. Loepp, president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. “Accident Fund has grown significantly since becoming a national carrier of workers’ compensation. We believe the company will continue to grow and expand here in Michigan if given more opportunities to do so in the future.”

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Construction still struggles for momentum

New construction starts in September retreated 7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $405.2 billion, according to an Oct. 18 report by McGraw-Hill Construction.

Nonbuilding construction, which is comprised of public works and electric utilities, pulled back following strong activity reported over the summer. Meanwhile, both nonresidential building and housing showed some improvement in September after their loss of momentum in the preceding month. For the January-September period of 2010, total construction came in at $314.6 billion, down 3 percent from the same period a year ago.

“The monthly pattern shows that construction starts have essentially stabilized at a low level, but have not yet reached the point where renewed expansion is taking hold,” said Robert A. Murray, vice president of economic affairs for McGraw-Hill Construction. “For various reasons, a sustained upturn for overall construction activity remains several quarters away.”

He said the lift that had been provided to the public works sector from the stimulus funding is now subsiding. Murray added: “vacancy rates for commercial properties remain high, and will be slow to recede given the weak employment picture. The tough fiscal climate for states and localities is making it more difficult for institutional projects to go ahead. And, the freeze on home foreclosures may well extend the time needed to correct the imbalances in the housing sector.”

One nugget of good news came from the Architecture Billings Index, which reported on Oct. 20 that a growth in design activity in September was the fourth straight month of higher activity. The new projects index was also up sharply.

“This is certainly encouraging news, but we will need to see consistent improvement over the next few months in order to feel comfortable about the state of the design and construction industry,” said American Institute of Architects Chief Economist Kermit Baker. “While there has been increasing demand for design services, it is happening at a slow rate and there continue to be other obstacles that are preventing a more accelerated recovery. Still, the strong upturn in design activity in the commercial and industrial sector certainly suggests that this upturn can possibly be sustained.”

The 3 percent decline for total construction during the first nine months of 2010 was the result of varied behavior by major sector. Nonresidential building fell 11 percent  year-to-date. Commercial building was down 20 percent; manufacturing building down 16 percent, and institutional building dropped 7 percent. Non-building construction in the first nine months of 2010 slipped 3 percent.

Geographically, total construction during the first nine months of 2010 revealed an increase for one region – the Northeast was up 7 percent. Total construction in the Midwest held steady with a year ago, while total construction declines were reported for the South Central, down 3 percent; the West, down 6 percent, and the South

Atlantic, down 10 percent.

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NEWS BRIEFS

Short window for extending jobless money

More than 1 million long-term unemployed workers a month will lose their unemployment benefits – the weekly check that helps keep a roof over their families’ heads and food on the table – if Congress doesn’t act by Nov. 30.

That’s the date the extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits program expires. But Congress does not return to work until Nov. 15 and then will adjourn again for the Thanksgiving holiday, leaving just a few days when lawmakers are in town to extend the lifeline that has been so vital as unemployment continues to hover near 10 percent.

Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), says that in 2009 alone, UI benefits have kept 3.3 million American families – including 1.5 million children – from falling into poverty.

With the holiday season approaching, it would be especially cruel to families and bad for businesses to cut off these benefits. Any cuts would also be a drastic departure from how unemployment insurance has functioned ever since the Great Depression; Congress has never cut back on federally-funded jobless benefits when unemployment is so high.

NELP in recent days launched an online campaign – UnemployedWorkers.org – as a resource to mobilize support and push Congress to act before the Nov. 30 deadline. That will be a big lift because for the past two years, Republicans have tried to block every extension of the extended UI program.

Says Owens: “Congress took seven weeks to reauthorize the extensions when benefits expired last June, and in that time, more than 2 million unemployed Americans and their families lost their jobless benefits. Some Republicans and radio blowhards have even claimed unemployment insurance benefits – an average of just a little more than $300 a week – make jobless workers so comfortable, they won’t go out and look for work. Not that there’s much out there.

One of those radio voices is Rush Limbaugh, who said, “the longer you pay people not to work, the longer they’re not going to try to work. He added: “the question is how the hell are we going to pay for this?”

Owens calls such claims “insulting and infuriating.”

– James Parks, AFL-CIO

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