Progress Michigan blog posts.

Rick in Wonderland

“We have outsourced a substantial portion of our manufacturing operations to countries in Asia…” The far right already has its Tea Party. Now, it’s got a Mad Hatter. Because you’d have to be mad, right, to think that what Michigan needs is a corporate CEO. Because those CEOs have done a lot for the country,…

Hypocrisy thy name is Business Leaders for Michigan

If you want to know the meaning of hypocrisy, take a minute to observe those much-touted millionaire CEOs from Michigan aka Business Leaders for Michigan in action. With their usual flair for faulty, bended statistics and green eyeshade vision, Business Leaders for Michigan wrote state lawmakers urging them to take back a 3% raise slated…

How Many Jobs Will It Take?

How many jobs created and saved by the federal jobs program will it take to nudge the far right into action? Hopefully, it’s just 280,000. That’s the number of construction jobs saved and created by the first wave of President Obama’s federal jobs program. But the way extreme conservatives tell the story, the jobs program…

Can We Talk?

You know how sometimes the far right will accuse the President of attempting to ram legislation down their throats instead of listening to their feedback and involving them in a bipartisan conversation in order to pass, say, meaningful health care reform legislation? And you know how sometimes you know they’re just grandstanding about that but…

Behind the Kitchen Door

If you had to guess — hint, you have to — what would you bet is the nation’s largest private sector employer? Wrong. It’s actually the restaurant industry. And while the industry is employing lots of folks, they’re not making much money (think under $13K annually), there are few health benefits, and the working conditions…

Hey, Mike Bishop!

Like most Michiganders, I have watched as your last round of “reforms” contributed to growing hardships and deficits in schools, more of our needy getting sick and dying for lack of health care services, and public safety being slashed, all so you can claim to have never raised taxes on Michigan’s hard working families. But…