What follows is a remarkably pithy yet insightful explanation of both the underpinnings of, and casual damage to, the increasingly fragile American body economic. Moreover, the snarky, tough guy tone of the author serves as an excellent mechanism for the distribution of this analysis. Enjoy-- and then go fix the world.
Source: http://master-of-none.tumblr.com/post/207991990/reprogram-the-reaganites
Reprogram the Reaganites
In BusinessWeek, a Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus blames the MBA farms for the current crisis. I think he’s right to blame the schools, in part, but wrong about why.
The author says we went astray by orienting business education away from relationships (good managers, customer service) and towards processes (efficiency, business channel segmentation). And this supposedly leads companies to make bad decisions. I don’t buy it.
He is correct, however, when he says that ethics don’t enter into the debate: “Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical.”
Anti-ethical, and yet this is what we require from our CEOs and management teams. By law, the CEO is required to do everything legally possible to achieve gains for his shareholders.
If we are getting bad outcomes from this arrangement, we need to make more bad stuff illegal.
And the reason we haven’t made more bad stuff illegal is because of two ideas popularized in the 1980’s:
Free markets are good (courtesy of Milton Friedman, University of Chicago)
Markets are efficient (courtesy of Eugene Fama, University of Chicago)
For the record, I do believe that free markets are usually a good thing (i.e. self-interest is a strong natural motivator), and I agree that large well-trafficked markets are usually efficient. The dangers to society (and the bad outcomes) happen when these theories are taken to the extreme, like religious fanaticism.
Some academics, many management teams, almost every bank CEO, countless right-wing think tanks, and the mainstream media (especially CNBC), will absolutely demonize any deviation from these two principles (or for that matter any deviation from the belief that stocks outperform in the long-run, which happens to be grossly inaccurate).
But, in any case, society is harmed by both of the extreme versions of these theories.
Do you like really free markets? How about we bring back slavery, then? And I suppose people don’t really need to be licensed to practice medicine? Where do we draw the line? How dangerous is too dangerous for an outsourced petrochemical plant? Profit-seeking managers will likely generate worse outcomes than than a robust legislative system, when it comes to this type of debate.
Efficient markets don’t get a free pass, either. The article’s use of the mortgage industry as an example is a good one: “It was completely redesigned since the 1980s along good HBS guidelines—to maximize efficiency, lower costs, and increase liquidity. Collateral damage: no relationships, skewed incentives, incompetent regulation, and greed run amok.”
What really happened was that “easy” short-term profit-seeking activities (how hard is it to swindle from the poor uneducated masses, really?) undermined the long-term viability of corporate institutions (and therefore the entire financial system). If markets are efficient, they will allocate capital to viable long-term enterprises with net positive returns. That didn’t happen. Not by a long shot.
So, we need to re-educate the Reagan generation:
Fair markets, with strong rules that don’t let corporations hurt societies, are good
Some markets are efficient, others aren’t, and irrationality exists
There. Now go fix the world.
(A cynic would argue that right now the short-term profit seekers are getting in the way of making more bad stuff illegal. Call it regulatory capture. Or state-capture. But as Alton Brown would say, that’s another show.)
Monday, October 12, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Elizabeth Warren: An Ode to the Middle Class
Elizabeth Warren is a professor @ Harvard Law School and, in the words of Cornell "Not Related To Kayne" West, a "decent sister." Belwo is an excerpt from an interview she did with the Washington Post. Full text of interview here.
WARREN:we're in trouble on so many fronts.
I will start with credit. We clean up the credit mess. This is like sewing up a hole in the bottom of someone's pocket. This is literally tens of billions of dollars that are just falling out of the pockets of middleclass families and making their way over to a handful of very large financial institutions. We can change some laws, and we can fix that one.
I have to say on health care, I do studies on families filing for bankruptcy in the aftermath of serious medical problems. Whatever else is going on in the debate is the reminder that even with people with health insurance are paying enormous sums for medical care, whether it's about copays, things that are denied and higher prices that they're paying for their health insurance. So whatever we can do to bring those costs under control for middle class families will help enormously.
Sending the kids to college, the costs are just out of control. And we are putting debt loads on children unlike those we have ever imagined.
The housing crisis. The way in which most American families build wealth is not through the stock market. It's by buying a home and paying it off. That is, for most Americans, their retirement account. They'll get that house paid off, live on Social Security. That'll be the in heritance for the children if they don't have to spend it down for medical care.
The chaos in the housing market is destroying wealth for middle-class families. To the extent we're popping a bubble, I get it. That's what it's going to have to be. But I worry now about overshooting in the other direction. You know, that just like a bubble pushes up too high, the collapse pushes down too low.
We're watching more and more families go underwater on their mortgages and not by 5 percent, going underwater by 25 and 30 percent. And this is going to intersect with unemployment. As unemployment keeps going up, more and more people are going to lose their houses. That means it depresses the value of the houses next door because it's all downward pressure on prices.
And, of course, the last one I would mention is the income front. As the pie grew throughout the 20th century, the portion that went to workers, went to the median earning family in the United States, it stayed the same percentage wise, but that meant a bigger and bigger pie was a bigger and bigger slice of pizza.
That began to shift in the '70s, and, ultimately, what happened is that the pie kept getting bigger. It's measured through productivity. It's measured through GDP. But the proportion that middleclass families got in income began to shrink.
As we talk about things, like what we produce in the United States, do we really have any manufacturing base, if not hard manufacturing, do we have other intellectual products where we think we have a comparative advantage, those kinds of issues about how workers get back in the role of participating in the growth in our economy, that's whether or not we're going to have a strong and vital middle class.
And, you know, at the end of the day, it's about these economic factors, but we have to remember we have fundamentally changed as a country.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, coming out of World War II, we said as a government, as a people, what can we do to support the middle class. You know that's what FHA was to help people get into homes, right? VA, GI loans on education, we looked at policies, like whether or not they strengthen and support the middle class.
Somewhere, that began to change in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and the middle class instead became like a resource to be pulled from, and you know, they became the turkey at the Thanksgiving dinner. Who could who could carve off a piece? Who can get this little piece? Who could make a profit from this piece and that piece or squeeze down on the wages? And the middle class has gotten shakier and shakier, hollowed out.
The consequences of that are far more than economic. The middle class is what makes us who we are. It's affects the poor. A strong and vital middle class is a middle class that can offer a helping hand to the poor. A strong and vital middle class is a middle class that has room, is creating new jobs to ¿ basically to suck the poor up out of poverty and into middleclass positions. The middle class is what gives us political stability. It's what gives us an America that's all bought into the whole process that what we do is not just about a handful of folks at the top who profit from it. We all profit from it, and that's why we work, and that's why we vote, and that's why we accept that the outcome of elections. And that's why we're safe to walk our streets, because we have a middle class for which this ultimately works, this country.
And every time we hollow that out, every time we take away a little piece of that, we run the risk that some of what we understood at America, some of what we know as America begins to die. That's what scares me.
WARREN:we're in trouble on so many fronts.
I will start with credit. We clean up the credit mess. This is like sewing up a hole in the bottom of someone's pocket. This is literally tens of billions of dollars that are just falling out of the pockets of middleclass families and making their way over to a handful of very large financial institutions. We can change some laws, and we can fix that one.
I have to say on health care, I do studies on families filing for bankruptcy in the aftermath of serious medical problems. Whatever else is going on in the debate is the reminder that even with people with health insurance are paying enormous sums for medical care, whether it's about copays, things that are denied and higher prices that they're paying for their health insurance. So whatever we can do to bring those costs under control for middle class families will help enormously.
Sending the kids to college, the costs are just out of control. And we are putting debt loads on children unlike those we have ever imagined.
The housing crisis. The way in which most American families build wealth is not through the stock market. It's by buying a home and paying it off. That is, for most Americans, their retirement account. They'll get that house paid off, live on Social Security. That'll be the in heritance for the children if they don't have to spend it down for medical care.
The chaos in the housing market is destroying wealth for middle-class families. To the extent we're popping a bubble, I get it. That's what it's going to have to be. But I worry now about overshooting in the other direction. You know, that just like a bubble pushes up too high, the collapse pushes down too low.
We're watching more and more families go underwater on their mortgages and not by 5 percent, going underwater by 25 and 30 percent. And this is going to intersect with unemployment. As unemployment keeps going up, more and more people are going to lose their houses. That means it depresses the value of the houses next door because it's all downward pressure on prices.
And, of course, the last one I would mention is the income front. As the pie grew throughout the 20th century, the portion that went to workers, went to the median earning family in the United States, it stayed the same percentage wise, but that meant a bigger and bigger pie was a bigger and bigger slice of pizza.
That began to shift in the '70s, and, ultimately, what happened is that the pie kept getting bigger. It's measured through productivity. It's measured through GDP. But the proportion that middleclass families got in income began to shrink.
As we talk about things, like what we produce in the United States, do we really have any manufacturing base, if not hard manufacturing, do we have other intellectual products where we think we have a comparative advantage, those kinds of issues about how workers get back in the role of participating in the growth in our economy, that's whether or not we're going to have a strong and vital middle class.
And, you know, at the end of the day, it's about these economic factors, but we have to remember we have fundamentally changed as a country.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, coming out of World War II, we said as a government, as a people, what can we do to support the middle class. You know that's what FHA was to help people get into homes, right? VA, GI loans on education, we looked at policies, like whether or not they strengthen and support the middle class.
Somewhere, that began to change in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and the middle class instead became like a resource to be pulled from, and you know, they became the turkey at the Thanksgiving dinner. Who could who could carve off a piece? Who can get this little piece? Who could make a profit from this piece and that piece or squeeze down on the wages? And the middle class has gotten shakier and shakier, hollowed out.
The consequences of that are far more than economic. The middle class is what makes us who we are. It's affects the poor. A strong and vital middle class is a middle class that can offer a helping hand to the poor. A strong and vital middle class is a middle class that has room, is creating new jobs to ¿ basically to suck the poor up out of poverty and into middleclass positions. The middle class is what gives us political stability. It's what gives us an America that's all bought into the whole process that what we do is not just about a handful of folks at the top who profit from it. We all profit from it, and that's why we work, and that's why we vote, and that's why we accept that the outcome of elections. And that's why we're safe to walk our streets, because we have a middle class for which this ultimately works, this country.
And every time we hollow that out, every time we take away a little piece of that, we run the risk that some of what we understood at America, some of what we know as America begins to die. That's what scares me.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Tax credits, subsidies and pernicious threats: Business still does not understand that to get along, it must go along
As noted in the article below, the State of Michigan simply can't win in its dealings with big business. The story is equally applicable in all forty-nine other states, where the incentives required to lure a few hundred jobs from another state often costs the "winner" more than would have been lost in refusing to extend unwarranted subsidies to unappreciative business vermin-- the same cabal that will relentlessly continue to socialize the risk of economic failure while privatizing the benefit of profit. If this trend continues (and there's no evidence of it is waning), then the economy of the States, and the nation as a whole, will continue to deteriorate as the Electrolux's of the world exploit cheap foreign labor while demanding access to the American market and the protection of its laws.
In Michigan, A Yellow Light For Green Jobs:
Some Question Focus of Ailing State's Governor
By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
LANSING, Mich. -- If the future of American manufacturing lies in green industries, the Michigan governor's pursuit of jobs offers a cautionary tale.
Four years ago, Jennifer M. Granholm set out to remake her state, which took an exceptional walloping with the decline of the auto industry, as a pioneer in creating environmentally friendly jobs. Today, however, jobs are still disappearing much faster than she can create them, raising questions about how long it will take Michigan and other hard-hit states to find new industries to employ their workers.
Since taking office in 2003, Granholm has created 163,300 positions, her office says. She expects that a recent infusion of more than $1 billion from the Obama administration aimed at nurturing car battery and electric-vehicle projects will generate 40,000 more positions by 2020.
In the past decade, however, as the auto industry has grown smaller, Michigan has lost 870,000 jobs -- about 632,000 of them during Granholm's tenure. The number is expected to reach 1 million by late next year, the end of her term.
In her effort to attract employers, the governor has taken up the latest arms in the economic arsenal -- tax credits, loans, Super Bowl tickets and a willingness to travel as far as Japan for a weekend to try to persuade an auto parts company to bring more jobs to Michigan. She has won solar and wind energy, electric car batteries, and movie production jobs. About 10,800 of the new positions came from overseas companies, according to her office, the fruits of visits to seven countries.
"We have great bones as a state," she says. "We know how to build stuff. We will build on that strength and diversify this economy. We will lead the nation in creating jobs in renewable energy. We're not going to be viewed as Luddites."
In a state hit so hard by the recession, though, securing every new job has required enormous effort: mobilizing the state bureaucracy, negotiating tax deals with a politically divided legislature, dispelling impressions that Michigan is a pro-union state and inhospitable to business.
Supporters and detractors alike call the 5-foot-7-inch blonde "Jenny the cheerleader" because of her relentless optimism. She prefers zealot. Those qualities were severely tested three years ago when appliance maker Electrolux closed its century-old refrigerator plant in Greenville, 160 miles northwest of Detroit, and moved to Mexico, taking 3,000 jobs from the town of 8,000.
As Granholm told the story in her office, overlooking the state Capitol, tears welled up in her eyes. She had spent months calling, e-mailing and meeting with city and state officials trying to sway the company to take a package worth about $70 million in tax breaks to stay in Michigan. Electrolux left anyway.
Granholm visited with workers at an orchard near the plant within days of the last refrigerators coming off the assembly line, and the employees ate a "last supper" of boxed lunches while a band played. Her staff had scheduled 45 minutes. She stayed three hours, listening to workers' stories.
"I went to say, 'I'm sorry,' " Granholm said. "We couldn't save it. I can't even say it now. I stayed until the last guy left."
A 48-year-old man with tattoos and a ponytail, who had worked at the plant since high school, described how his grandfather and father had worked there, too.
"He told me, 'I don't know anything else. Who is going to hire me?' " the governor recalled.
Granholm remembered coming home and telling her husband, "I just don't know what to do for people."
A $37 million tax package helped persuade Michigan-based United Solar Ovonic -- she wooed the chairman with a trip to the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit -- to build a solar panel production plant on the Electrolux property instead of pursuing a South Carolina offer. To retrain workers, she secured money from the legislature and later developed "No Worker Left Behind." With new skills and a new plant, the people of Greenville would have new opportunities.
Except, she discovered from a workforce training agency, only about 20 percent of the 400 jobs at the new plant, which opened in 2007, went to former Electrolux workers. Many simply didn't have the skills; some were fearful about their ability to learn.
"You had people who were testing in at sixth-grade math," she said, "when they'd gotten awards as line workers."
Granholm had a community college and a state workforce training agency set up a separate program so they wouldn't feel humiliated beside more skilled students.
"It was taking one step forward and then one step back, and then two steps forward," she said. "We still didn't get the numbers we wanted to get."
Residents remember the time and effort invested in seeking to preserve the Electrolux jobs.
"She put everything she had into trying to save that little town," said Dick Long, a former national political director for the United Auto Workers union. "I've never seen somebody work so hard and get so frustrated in trying to save them. She just didn't give up. But in the end, we lost them."
Although Granholm's critics admire her determination and concede that creating jobs and transforming the economy are long-term goals, they say that she has not done enough to streamline state government and regulations and that she is too enamored of alternative-energy jobs, which they say represent a relatively small number of positions.
Genesee County Treasurer Daniel T. Kildee, like Granholm a Democrat, said she is "too concerned about finding consensus with the legislature and interest groups."
He worries that the focus on green-energy jobs detracts from fixing problems such as those facing schools and municipal governments. "The green economy is not going to replace jobs of an industrial era," he said. "It is an important part of the new economy. But it is not the next GM."
Granholm says she is trying to diversify the economy, going after defense-related firms, robotics and life sciences along with green jobs.
State Senate Majority Leader Michael Bishop (R) says Granholm has been remiss in not reshaping Michigan's business tax.
The state, he said, needs to change its image and "create an environment where taxes are low, labor costs are low, and not send so many negative vibes."
Granholm's office said that she has offered business tax proposals but that she has met opposition from the legislature and some business leaders.
Michigan felt the recession first and hardest. The state ranks fifth in foreclosures and last in attracting new residents. Nearly 20 percent of its citizens are on Medicaid. As the auto industry has shrunk, so has tax revenue. The state government technically shut down for nearly two hours early Thursday over a budget crisis, and the legislature and governor are still tussling over how to resolve a projected $2.8 billion deficit. Underlying all of the grim statistics is the loss of jobs. Michigan has had the nation's highest unemployment rate -- now 15.2 percent -- for most of the past three years.
"This is not a time for wimps," Granholm says to her two dozen cabinet members one recent morning. "The message is to continue to play offense -- go get jobs."
Granholm's résumé is well known in her state: Michigan's first female attorney general and governor; mentioned as U.S. Supreme Court candidate; graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard Law School, beauty queen, mother of three. The 50-year-old is a native of Canada who settled in Detroit in the mid-1980s after marrying a Michigan man; she was a federal prosecutor there for four years.
Her quick focus pleases businessmen such as David Hardee, top executive of California-based Clairvoyant Energy, who encountered Granholm at a meeting after spending three months negotiating with her economic development officials over a green-energy development.
"We were on the third slide and she politely interrupted and said, 'I get it. What do you need? I'm here,' " Hardee said.
With a tax incentive package worth more than $100 million, Michigan beat out Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, as well as Spain, in getting Hardee's company and two other alternative-energy firms -- one from Texas and one from Switzerland -- to take a factory that once made the Lincoln Continental and Ford Thunderbird about 40 miles northwest of Detroit in Wixom and turn it into a solar panel and battery storage pack manufacturer employing 4,000 workers.
In the spring of 2008, Granholm returned to Greenville to tour the United Solar plant that replaced the Electrolux factory.
"They had product orders all the way out until June 2009 back then," said Greenville Mayor Ken Snow. "But the global economy shifted. That left them with more product than orders that need to be filled."
Since March, United Solar has been feeling the downturn, and so have the workers in those hard-won positions. Some have been furloughed for six days each month.
There are no easy victories in the fight for jobs.
"You can't give up," Granholm says. "You gotta keep moving."
In Michigan, A Yellow Light For Green Jobs:
Some Question Focus of Ailing State's Governor
By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
LANSING, Mich. -- If the future of American manufacturing lies in green industries, the Michigan governor's pursuit of jobs offers a cautionary tale.
Four years ago, Jennifer M. Granholm set out to remake her state, which took an exceptional walloping with the decline of the auto industry, as a pioneer in creating environmentally friendly jobs. Today, however, jobs are still disappearing much faster than she can create them, raising questions about how long it will take Michigan and other hard-hit states to find new industries to employ their workers.
Since taking office in 2003, Granholm has created 163,300 positions, her office says. She expects that a recent infusion of more than $1 billion from the Obama administration aimed at nurturing car battery and electric-vehicle projects will generate 40,000 more positions by 2020.
In the past decade, however, as the auto industry has grown smaller, Michigan has lost 870,000 jobs -- about 632,000 of them during Granholm's tenure. The number is expected to reach 1 million by late next year, the end of her term.
In her effort to attract employers, the governor has taken up the latest arms in the economic arsenal -- tax credits, loans, Super Bowl tickets and a willingness to travel as far as Japan for a weekend to try to persuade an auto parts company to bring more jobs to Michigan. She has won solar and wind energy, electric car batteries, and movie production jobs. About 10,800 of the new positions came from overseas companies, according to her office, the fruits of visits to seven countries.
"We have great bones as a state," she says. "We know how to build stuff. We will build on that strength and diversify this economy. We will lead the nation in creating jobs in renewable energy. We're not going to be viewed as Luddites."
In a state hit so hard by the recession, though, securing every new job has required enormous effort: mobilizing the state bureaucracy, negotiating tax deals with a politically divided legislature, dispelling impressions that Michigan is a pro-union state and inhospitable to business.
Supporters and detractors alike call the 5-foot-7-inch blonde "Jenny the cheerleader" because of her relentless optimism. She prefers zealot. Those qualities were severely tested three years ago when appliance maker Electrolux closed its century-old refrigerator plant in Greenville, 160 miles northwest of Detroit, and moved to Mexico, taking 3,000 jobs from the town of 8,000.
As Granholm told the story in her office, overlooking the state Capitol, tears welled up in her eyes. She had spent months calling, e-mailing and meeting with city and state officials trying to sway the company to take a package worth about $70 million in tax breaks to stay in Michigan. Electrolux left anyway.
Granholm visited with workers at an orchard near the plant within days of the last refrigerators coming off the assembly line, and the employees ate a "last supper" of boxed lunches while a band played. Her staff had scheduled 45 minutes. She stayed three hours, listening to workers' stories.
"I went to say, 'I'm sorry,' " Granholm said. "We couldn't save it. I can't even say it now. I stayed until the last guy left."
A 48-year-old man with tattoos and a ponytail, who had worked at the plant since high school, described how his grandfather and father had worked there, too.
"He told me, 'I don't know anything else. Who is going to hire me?' " the governor recalled.
Granholm remembered coming home and telling her husband, "I just don't know what to do for people."
A $37 million tax package helped persuade Michigan-based United Solar Ovonic -- she wooed the chairman with a trip to the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit -- to build a solar panel production plant on the Electrolux property instead of pursuing a South Carolina offer. To retrain workers, she secured money from the legislature and later developed "No Worker Left Behind." With new skills and a new plant, the people of Greenville would have new opportunities.
Except, she discovered from a workforce training agency, only about 20 percent of the 400 jobs at the new plant, which opened in 2007, went to former Electrolux workers. Many simply didn't have the skills; some were fearful about their ability to learn.
"You had people who were testing in at sixth-grade math," she said, "when they'd gotten awards as line workers."
Granholm had a community college and a state workforce training agency set up a separate program so they wouldn't feel humiliated beside more skilled students.
"It was taking one step forward and then one step back, and then two steps forward," she said. "We still didn't get the numbers we wanted to get."
Residents remember the time and effort invested in seeking to preserve the Electrolux jobs.
"She put everything she had into trying to save that little town," said Dick Long, a former national political director for the United Auto Workers union. "I've never seen somebody work so hard and get so frustrated in trying to save them. She just didn't give up. But in the end, we lost them."
Although Granholm's critics admire her determination and concede that creating jobs and transforming the economy are long-term goals, they say that she has not done enough to streamline state government and regulations and that she is too enamored of alternative-energy jobs, which they say represent a relatively small number of positions.
Genesee County Treasurer Daniel T. Kildee, like Granholm a Democrat, said she is "too concerned about finding consensus with the legislature and interest groups."
He worries that the focus on green-energy jobs detracts from fixing problems such as those facing schools and municipal governments. "The green economy is not going to replace jobs of an industrial era," he said. "It is an important part of the new economy. But it is not the next GM."
Granholm says she is trying to diversify the economy, going after defense-related firms, robotics and life sciences along with green jobs.
State Senate Majority Leader Michael Bishop (R) says Granholm has been remiss in not reshaping Michigan's business tax.
The state, he said, needs to change its image and "create an environment where taxes are low, labor costs are low, and not send so many negative vibes."
Granholm's office said that she has offered business tax proposals but that she has met opposition from the legislature and some business leaders.
Michigan felt the recession first and hardest. The state ranks fifth in foreclosures and last in attracting new residents. Nearly 20 percent of its citizens are on Medicaid. As the auto industry has shrunk, so has tax revenue. The state government technically shut down for nearly two hours early Thursday over a budget crisis, and the legislature and governor are still tussling over how to resolve a projected $2.8 billion deficit. Underlying all of the grim statistics is the loss of jobs. Michigan has had the nation's highest unemployment rate -- now 15.2 percent -- for most of the past three years.
"This is not a time for wimps," Granholm says to her two dozen cabinet members one recent morning. "The message is to continue to play offense -- go get jobs."
Granholm's résumé is well known in her state: Michigan's first female attorney general and governor; mentioned as U.S. Supreme Court candidate; graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard Law School, beauty queen, mother of three. The 50-year-old is a native of Canada who settled in Detroit in the mid-1980s after marrying a Michigan man; she was a federal prosecutor there for four years.
Her quick focus pleases businessmen such as David Hardee, top executive of California-based Clairvoyant Energy, who encountered Granholm at a meeting after spending three months negotiating with her economic development officials over a green-energy development.
"We were on the third slide and she politely interrupted and said, 'I get it. What do you need? I'm here,' " Hardee said.
With a tax incentive package worth more than $100 million, Michigan beat out Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, as well as Spain, in getting Hardee's company and two other alternative-energy firms -- one from Texas and one from Switzerland -- to take a factory that once made the Lincoln Continental and Ford Thunderbird about 40 miles northwest of Detroit in Wixom and turn it into a solar panel and battery storage pack manufacturer employing 4,000 workers.
In the spring of 2008, Granholm returned to Greenville to tour the United Solar plant that replaced the Electrolux factory.
"They had product orders all the way out until June 2009 back then," said Greenville Mayor Ken Snow. "But the global economy shifted. That left them with more product than orders that need to be filled."
Since March, United Solar has been feeling the downturn, and so have the workers in those hard-won positions. Some have been furloughed for six days each month.
There are no easy victories in the fight for jobs.
"You can't give up," Granholm says. "You gotta keep moving."
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