Scott Martelle

The New York Times is publishing some strong work diving deeply into a practice that I've long found bizarre, and corrosive to stable communities - the granting of tax incentives to companies to attract development, or to keep them from leaving.

I wrote about this, but not with much depth, in my Detroit: A Biography. Former Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young, even as he took part in the bidding, used to argue that communities competing against each other for corporate investments does nothing but reward corporations. He was right then, and the problem continues. Corporations play local governments against each other to gain the best tax-reduction deal they can, often just shifting the jobs from one site in a metro area to another. And when the commitment expires (or sometimes before, as the Times reports), the companies pull out anyway. Ultimately stockholders benefit, but the community the business abandons suffers; the community that wins the business suffers in increased infrastructure costs and reduced tax support; and that second community suffers again when the corporation's next move is overseas.

The practice ought to be banned, but good luck getting any such measure through Congress (and it would likely face a Constitutional problem over states' rights anyway). The practice is yet another example of governmental support for corporations and businesses ahead of communities. And yes, I know these deals create jobs, but as the Times analysis shows, the cost does not equal the benefit. From the story:

A portrait arises of mayors and governors who are desperate to create jobs, outmatched by multinational corporations and short on tools to fact-check what companies tell them. Many of the officials said they feared that companies would move jobs overseas if they did not get subsidies in the United States.

Over the years, corporations have increasingly exploited that fear, creating a high-stakes bazaar where they pit local officials against one another to get the most lucrative packages. States compete with other states, cities compete with surrounding suburbs, and even small towns have entered the race with the goal of defeating their neighbors.

While some jobs have certainly migrated overseas, many companies receiving incentives were not considering leaving the country, according to interviews and incentive data.

The Times also put together a searchable database of the concessions. It's a sobering overview of a misguided practice, and one that adds yet another layer of financial stress to communities reeling under the recent recession; balky hiring by companies hoarding cash instead of investing; unfunded state and federal mandates; and this bizarre expectation of voters that they shouldn't have to pay for basic services.

It's a mess, and one without easy solutions - and no discernible political will. Read More 

I found a bit of history in my pocket the other day.

We have a couple of receptacles in the house to hold loose change for an eventual run to the credit union. One gets the silver (these are colors, not content) and the other gets the copper pennies. I pulled a small handful of coins from my pocket and, as I began separating them, noticed that one penny had a couple of wheat stalks on the back, curled around the inside edge of the coin. That meant the coin was at least as old as I am (the current Lincoln Memorial design was adopted in 1959). Flipping it over, I found the date – 1940, with the tell-tale “s” below the year meaning it was minted in San Francisco.

You don’t stumble across many coins that old in circulation these days. As coins go, this one’s not worth much to collectors (maybe a dime). The U.S. mint in San Francisco cranked out nearly 113 million pennies that year, so they aren't rare, and the one that cropped up in my change is far from mint-condition. The edges are slightly worn, and the front has a thin layer of shellac over it, as though it had been part of a display at some point.

Yet the coin represents more than a single cent. It is a touchstone to the past. The year this particular coin was minted, Hitler’s Nazi Germany – with Paris already in its control – began a nine-month bombing blitz of British cities. Americans, with vivid memories of the last European war just two decades earlier, wanted to remain neutral. President Roosevelt, fearing what the fall of England would mean for Europe, and the world, hatched his “lend-lease” program to aid the British without committing U.S. troops. That came just a few months after the U.S. Congress, fearful of fascist and communist infiltrators, enacted the 1940 Smith Act, the law that lies at the heart of my second book, The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy in Trial.

So this coin came into the world near the onset of a nearly all-encompassing global convulsion of violence. The world has changed since then. It's become more crowded, more polluted, more complicated in many ways. But it’s unchanged in that we as a species can’t seem to find a way to avoid killing each other in encounters personal, national, and tribal (be the bonds faith or blood).

Maybe that’s our curse, as a species, and as a nation. Over more than 235 years, we have rarely been at peace, from the "pacification" of the native tribes to fights with Mexico, to skirmishes in the Pacific to that massive war among ourselves. And that's just the first century. It's a staggering list to contemplate.

Of our most common four coins, three feature war presidents - the Lincoln penny, the Roosevelt dime, and the Washington quarter. Washington obviously was a general before the nation was founded, and even though he was the first president, it is as the hero of the revolution that we remember him. Jefferson, on the nickel, was part of the Revolution but is remembered mostly for his role in writing the Constitution and expanding the nation. But the bulk of the national medals - our coins - that we carry around are physical reminders of wars past.

And Lincoln, of course, came to a violent end, which means the most common coin in American currency bears the likeness of a murder victim.

It’s funny the kind of history you can find in the change in your pocket. Read More 

Well, if you read my post from the other day, you know that I’m happy with yesterday’s presidential election result. But I greet it not with a sense of elation, but rather a sense of relief. And a bit of resigned foreboding, for in the end, after all those hundreds of millions of dollars spent in campaigning up and down the ticket, very little has changed.

The best news: The Tea Party-infused ideas that the Romney-Ryan ticket brought to a national referendum were rebuffed, and one can only hope this means the end of it. Though I doubt it, and that brings us to the bad news. The Senate remains Democratic, and the House remains Republican with no meaningful shift in the ratio of seats. More significantly, the Tea Partiers retained their clout within the Republican caucus in the House, even if they lost some seats, or chances for seats, in the Senate.

What this suggests is that across a broad electorate, the hard-right positions that cropped up during the campaign were rejected. But with the inherent corruption of gerrymandered Congressional districts, those ideas stay alive. If we’re ever going to find a way out of this morass of partisanship in Washington, we’re going to have to find a way to blow up the redistricting process, end the gerrymandering of safe seats for both parties, and move to a open primary system across the nation in which the top-two vote-getters in a primary face off in a general election in non-gerrymandered districts.

Otherwise, the system remains locked in stalemate here in the United Stasis of America.

Ironically, the framers of the Constitution saw the House as being responsive to the mercurial whims of the electorate, as the members face election every two years. The Senate was the to be the chamber of stability, with members selected every six years on a rolling schedule (one third up for election every other year). But with gerrymandering of Congressional Districts - unanticipated by the framers - the House members are now nearly as stable under a system in which the only real change seems to come from political pressures within the two major parties (Tea Partiers winning primaries in GOP-heavy districts, for example).

And so the nation toddles dysfunctionally on. And, as Billy Bragg sang, all we get is the sound of ideologies clashing:

While we expect democracy
They're laughing in our face
And although our cries get louder
The laughter gets louder still
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

 Read More 

Well, we sat down Friday night for our annual date with the election guide, and to fill out our absentee ballots. It was finally time for this undecided voter to decide, and decide I did. But my indecision was not what you might think.

There's been a lot of noise about those who remain undecided in what has been a presidential campaign of stark contrasts. And a lot of mockery of us undecideds, from our purported stupidity to our lack of a political gyroscope. To which I call bullshit. For two key reasons. One, we aren't all centrists wavering between right and left. And two, some of the most unthinking people I've encountered during my many years of political campaign coverage are those who make up their minds early, and for irrational reasons. Talk about an unthinking engagement with the political process, how about all of those folks who vote Democratic or Republican simply because that's what they always do? Even when their candidate lacks the credentials or credibility to hold public office?

I'm quite certain I follow political campaigns and issues much more closely than the average person, and more closely than many of those who've disparaged us undecideds for our perceived lack of engagement. So my ballot was not cast in a fog. It was well thought out.

In fact, I knew early on who I would not be voting for: Romney. Naked political ambition unleavened by a discernible philosophical framework is a recipe for leadership disaster. He persuaded me during his rightward lurch in the GOP primaries that he was indeed the Etch-A-Sketch candidate, and as a result not someone to be taken seriously sitting in the Oval Office. I became convinced that if he was sincere about many of the positions he had taken, he would lead this country into a Depression-style crisis domestically, and into warrantless wars overseas.

My indecision came over Obama, for whom I voted with pleasure in 2008 (note: as a matter of professional habit I did not vote in elections I covered; I stopped covering the 2008 race in September, so felt free to cast a ballot in that one). He could have been an agent for real political change, but over three years Obama proved to have been a much better campaigner than leader, and to have been co-opted by the Clinton-style pro-corporate centrist policies of the core Democratic Party. He entered office with serious political capital but squandered much of it. It wasn't all bad. The auto bailout was a significant success, and I believe some of his other policies mitigated the economic disaster brought on by the Republicans.

But there's more at stake than money. The health care plan, lauded by Democrats, was too little for the problems we face. Obama could have done better. He was slow to get us out of the wars he promised to get us out of (and added troops to Afghanistan); Guantanamo Bay is still a prison for suspected terrorists (many of whom are being held on the sketchiest of evidence); the National Defense Authorization Act that Obama signed is chilling in its unconstitutional throwback to the McCarthy era; the Obama administration has been even less open than the Bush Administration, as hard as that is to conceive; and Obama is still campaigning about the need to close loopholes that reward corporations for shipping jobs overseas - something he campaigned on the first time around, to little effect.

So my indecision was not between Obama and Romney, but between Obama and someone else. I often turn to the Peace and Freedom Party for my protest vote, but they nominated comedian Roseanne Barr, a joke I can't go along with (and, frankly, destroying its credibility as an alternative party). The Green Party has put up a serious slate led by Jill Stein. And I almost sent my vote there. But in the end I went with Obama essentially as a loud rebuke - well, as loud as a single vote can be - to the Republican Party and its policies, and to the Machiavellian candidacy of Romney/Ryan.

But I'm not happy about it. I may have voted for Obama, but I'm still ambivalent about his leadership, and stand in stark opposition to what the one-time Constitutional law college instructor is doing to our civil liberties.

So in the end, I guess I took the turn Ralph Nader has cried against for years: Don't vote against something, vote for something. This time, I voted against. And while four years ago I voted with a sense of hope, this time it is with a nagging fear that I may have made a mistake. I hope Obama wins, but more significantly, I hope he proves that my fears are unwarranted. Read More 

I'm looking forward to heading to Detroit this week for a talk at the Detroit Public Library on Wednesday, then to sit on some panels at the annual North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University.

The book talk is self-explanatory. We'll be in the Friends Conference Room, starting promptly at 6:30 p.m., where I'll talk about the book and then, I hope, lead a conversation with audience members about their experiences with Detroit. We'll discuss the need to overcome the legacy of racism and governmental/corporate policies to take advantage of what really is a yawning opportunity - a chance to rebuild a city, neighborhood by neighborhood. (And we'll be done in time to catch the Tigers-Yankees baseball playoff game on TV at Honest ? John's bar).

Thursday morning I'll give a reprise of the book talk to launch the Labor History Conference at 9 a.m. in McGregor Hall on the Wayne State campus, with comments from Beth Myers, director of the wonderful Walter Reuther Library; and two Wayne State professors, Steve Babson and Tracy Neumann.

That afternoon, I join Jack Lessenbery and Barb Ingalls to listen to Chris Rhomberg talk about his history of the Detroit newspaper strike, The Broken Table (Barb and I were active participants in that), and then give our take on the book (hint: I think Rhomberg did a solid job).

Saturday morning I'm back to talk about "The Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre" (the subject of my first book, Blood Passion) with Rosemary Feurer from Northern Illinois University, Anthony DeStefanis from Otterbein University, and Jonathan Rees from Colorado State University.

It's an academic conference so there's a registration fee, but I believe they also offer day fees. There should be details on the website somewhere. But the Library talk on Wednesday is free to the public. Read More 

One of the most visible of Detroit's many wasted opportunities, I think, is Henry Ford's former office building in Highland Park, an island city surrounded by Detroit, where his ideas on the assembly line took root and revolutionized the industrial world. The building has been essentially unused for years, and I've thought for more than two decades now that the Albert Kahn-designed building would be the perfect anchor for a Detroit auto-tourism industry.

And now it might be happening.

Crain's Detroit reports that the local Woodward Avenue Action Association is negotiating to buy the building from owner National Equity Corp. From the story:

The association hopes to restore the building and eventually host public tours at the site as an automotive heritage welcome center, commemorating its important role in the automotive industry and in the region’s past, (association Executive Director Heather) Carmona said.

Other possibilities include incorporating mixed-use aspects by hosting tech start-ups from the site and/or turning parts of it into housing.

The site is why Woodward is a National Byway and All-American Road, Carmona said. It’s one of the most historically significant buildings on Woodward, and some would say, one of the top five historically significant buildings in the country.

“It’s literally our story … the story of the manufacturing economy, the $5 dollar day, middle class. It’s a historic resource and economic development opportunity that we cannot let slip away,” Carmona said.

I really hope this works out. Detroiters learned long ago not only to not count a chicken before it's hatched, but probably best to wait until it's fully fledged. Detroit's history is full of failed dreams and frustrated ambitions, and this could still wither and die.

But I hope not. Detroit has a lot of things going for it, and industrial history is high among them. Converting some of these decaying survivors of a great past won't save the modern city, but it can add another dimension to a broad, diverse sweep of positive steps. Read More 

As you know, we spent most of the summer on the road driving cross-country where, as you also know, the weather set all sorts of records for heat. We encountered 107 degrees in Austin, 102 in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., and high 90s just about everywhere else. You all sweated through it, too.

A couple of weeks ago, scientists reported that the Arctic ice cap had reached a modern low as a result of global warming, and one expert predicted it could melt completely by the time of the next presidential election. Some 4.6 million square miles of ice melted, with 1.3 million square miles to go, all over the course of a summer. Yes, it will refreeze, but the issue is the thaw's devastating effect on Arctic life and its unknown influence on the world's weather patterns. And the receding ice means more of the environment exposed to human degradation. Where environmentalists see disaster, capitalists see dollar signs.

Yet, as Elizabeth Kolbert points out in a New Yorker blog post, the single biggest threat to our health and safety is an asterisk during the presidential campaign. We focus on the inane (exercise routines and gaffes) over the insane (our environmental and energy policies) at a moment of great world peril. From her post:

You might have thought that with the Arctic melting, the U.S. in the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, and more than sixty per cent of the lower forty-eight states experiencing “moderate to exceptional” drought, at least one of the candidates would feel compelled to speak out about the issue. If that’s the case, though, you probably live in a different country. Remarkably—or, really, by this point, predictably—the only times Mitt Romney has brought up the topic of climate change, it has been to mock President Obama for claiming, back in 2008, that he was going to try to do something about it.

Romney's election, I think, would be a disaster for the country, but he's right to mock Obama's environmental policies. More drilling in the Arctic and piping crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico are not only risky, they continue our dependence on fossil fuels.

Here's where the irony comes in. As temperatures increase, more people use more electricity to run air conditioning systems, which means burning more coal, which adds more crud to the atmosphere exacerbating the global warming that makes us turn to the air conditioning .... you see where this cycle leads. And no, the irony hasn't escaped me that we encountered all that summer heat while driving cross-country, adding our own little puffs of carbon emissions to the weather engine (we don't have air conditioning in our house).

There are a lot of incidental arguments for not dealing with this problem - we need power for industry, jobs, etc. - but none of them come close to the argument for doing something. The earth will go spinning on. The mountains will rise and erode. The seas will surge and churn.

We're the ones making that environment more and more inhospitable to human life. And we're the only ones who can do anything about it.

So let's talk about that. No, let's do something about that. Read More 

Well, I'm making steady progress on Jones's Bones: The Search for an American Hero, which is a lot of fun and proving to be more of a challenge than the other books, given the different time frames involved and the endlessly moving parts. But I'm taking a bit of a break in October to go back to Detroit for some talks.

As I posted the other day, the Detroit Public Library has invited me to come in and talk at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 17, about Detroit: A Biography in the main library on Woodward. I'm looking forward to this for a variety of reasons: I did a lot of research in that library, and this will be a public talk so I'm anticipating hearing a lot of other people's stories about their lives and Detroit's evolution. And yes, books will be available for sale and signing.

Also:

- Thursday, October 18, 9 a.m. : I'm kicking off the annual North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University with a talk about Detroit: A Biography. Books will be available there, too, and individual sessions are open to the public, according to the organizers.

- Thursday, October 18, 2:30 p.m.: Same place, I'm one of two former newspaper strikers (Barb Ingalls is the other) who will comment on a presentation by Chris Rhomberg of his The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor. Jack Lessenberry chairs the session.

- Saturday, October 20, 9 a.m.: I organized and will be part of a panel on "The Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre," which takes me back to my first book, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. With Jonathan Rees and Anthony DeStefanis, and chaired by Rosemary Feurer.

And for you Detroiters, I'll be available in the usual haunts for a cold beer if you want to say hello. :-)

Hope to see some of you at any or all of these events. And if you're part of the Detroit media, please do think about covering the Detroit Public Library talk or the NAHLC gathering. Read More 

It feels like I just left Detroit after a whirlwind visit on the summer-end return trip to the West Coast, but here I come again.

The Detroit Public Library has invited me to talk about Detroit: A Biography at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 17, in the Friends Auditorium of the Main Library. It's free and open to the public (Marwil Books will be selling books for signing).

I'm looking forward to this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which were the hours I spent in the DPL's Burton Historical Collection looking through archives and records to help bring to life some of the myriad stories included in Detroit. The Main Library is a beautiful building between the Detroit Institute of Arts and Wayne State University, making it a prime component of Detroit's urban intellectual core. And it is a gem of a place, though, like much of Detroit, the library has been fighting some significant budget problems.

The evening should be fascinating. I'll talk a bit about the genesis of the book, why I wrote it, some broad conclusions about how the city got to be in the shape it's in, and then open it up for questions and discussion. That, to me, is usually the most fascinating part of any talk, hearing the stories of people directly connected to the historical things I write about. I invariably learn something new, pick up a sliver of nuance I missed before, and often discover things that I wish had included in the book. I look at the sessions as an organic "afterword" to the book, told in real time, and through living voices.

I hope to see my Michigan readers -- and I'm gratified by how many of you there are -- at the talk and signing.

Incidentally, the talk occurs on the eve of the annual North American Labor History Conference (program director Fran Shor helped set up the library talk; thanks, Fran) at Wayne State University, where I'll be part of three different events. I'll post more about those as it gets closer.

Oh, and if you want a Word copy of the library flyer pictured here for posting or sharing, email me through the link in the column to the right and I'll send one out to by return email. Read More 

Damn big country we have here.


View Road trip 2012 in a larger map Read More