Conyers vs. Dingell?

Posted on March 3, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

If Republican mapmakers pit the longest-serving U.S. representative, John Dingell, against the second-longest-serving rep, John Conyers (both Democrats) in a new congressional district that includes liberal Ann Arbor, the fur is gonna fly.

I’ll be watching for a newbie or maybe even a veteran Democrat to challenge the two fossils.

But that may not happen if Conyers, faced for once with a real challenge, dropped out before a primary that likely would include Dingell in 2012.

According to A2politico.com, GOP strategists could throw Conyers against Dingell in a new district that takes in Washtenaw County, including Ann Arbor.

In theory, according to politico, those academically-oriented Ann Arbor voters would go for Conyers, perceiving him the more liberal of the choice: Conyers vs. Dingell.

If it’s correct that Ann Arbor liberals today would be attracted to Conyers in a primary battle, the tilt could vanish between now and August 2012.

All it would take would be for someone to start writing about who John Conyers really is.

The image of the liberal gadfly Conyers would wilt under a strong light.

Oh sure, JC talks a good fight. But what has he actually accomplished?

A hard question, for him.

But here are  harder ones for this long-serving rep to answer:

How does he run his office?

How does he manage his life?

Now that his wife, mouthy Monica, is in prison for taking bribes as a Detroit city councilwoman, we might wonder how it came about that such a supposedly shrewd politician got married to a future felon. And how those felonies were committed without his knowledge.

Setting family life aside, a congressman should be judged not only by how many laws were enacted that he or she wrote, but also by the quality of representation, including constituent service, he or she provides to the district, and the manner in which he treats the people who work for him.

Along with the issue of staff treatment would be the quality of staffer the congressman hires. Does he have a staffer convicted of felonies that were committed while running a scam from the congressman’s Detroit office  as Conyers’ aide DeWayne Boyd was and did? For that matter, do his staffers — aided by the same felon, Boyd — grab Thanksgiving turkeys intended for poor people?

His wife and his staffer, both felons.

Makes you wonder. Why hasn’t anybody written about this?

But wait a minute — somebody already HAS written about the real John Conyers.

Why, come to think of it, the first articles ran in the Detroit Free Press and were written by Free Press Lansing Bureau Chief Chris Christoff and by me, back when I was a Free Press staffer.

Our November 21, 2003 Free Press stories sparked an investigation of Conyers by the House Ethics Committee.

Conyers eventually was sanitized, which is to say he was allowed to dodge the bullet of allegations that he allowed his congressional staffers to be paid federal wages for doing political campaign work, tutoring his wife, and chauffeuring and babysitting his kids.

He got off in part because other than the initial Free Press stories, there was virtually no press coverage of the Conyers ethics story. For reasons I still don’t understand, the Free Press dropped the story, except for revisiting it on those rare occasions when some other news outlet scooped the Freep on news editors chose to sit on.

Oh yes, joelontheroad.com has published some articles on Conyers.

Bet there will be more to come if Dingell and Conyers face off.

Do you think misdeeds reported eight years ago are irrelevant to the politics of today? Well, as the French say, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme goddam chose: to wit, reports late in 2010 of Conyers “apologizing” because his son misused a congressional car.

As Yogi Berra said, “deja vu all over again.”

I’d love to see the GOP plunk these two aging warriors into a cage and let them tear each other apart.

But there is an alternative not foreseen by the sages at politico.com.

The implications of filing falsified pay vouchers for congressional staffers who received tax money for doing political and personal errands for their boss are not only ethical.

They could rise to the level of crimes.

Charles Diggs was a Detroit congressman convicted of assigning congressional staffers to work in his family funeral home while collecting federal pay. Charles Diggs went to jail.

Other members of Congress — I’m thinking of Barbara Rose-Collins — were allowed to skate away from federal investigations by announcing they wouldn’t seek re-election.

So it is possible that instead of a cage match between Dingell and Conyers, the GOP might unintentionally foster a real election race between Dingell and some Democratic newcomer?

Or maybe one of two veteran Democrats paired by the GOP in another district, such as Gary Peters or Sander Levin, might choose not to bloody each other, but rather flip a coin so that one of them might cut off life support to the oldsters.

Such an outcome would change the game.

It would also mean the Republicans would not have quite such a tight grip on the future.

And it would be fun to watch.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in JC & Me | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

‘Patten Bay’ it’s not — except that it is

Posted on March 2, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Canada’s geographic names board says a little lake in McGregor Bay where some of us have cottages is not called Patten Bay.

They are wrong.

I just got a note from Zoe McDougall saying her request to name the lake after Thaddeus Patten, her great-grandfather, was denied by the Ontario Geographic Names Board.

Thaddeus Patten surveyed much of northern Ontario including McGregor Bay in the early 1900s.

Afraid they’re too late.

The board had a chance to rubber-stamp fact, but instead they issued a denial, which amounts to fiction.

For Patten Bay is what we cottagers who live on that body of water are calling the place, regardless of rulings by the Geographical Names Board of Canada.

Mrs. McDougall put them in a bind.

On one hand, while no place in McGregor Bay is named after Thaddeus Patten, at least two other Ontario lakes bear his name.

On the other hand, the geographic names board had to be aware that time is on Mrs. McDougall’s side.
They specifically mentioned a Patten Lake near Killarney.

A third Patten Lake may seemed a bit over the top to the names board.

If so, it raises the question of how many times can you name a lake the same thing before it’s too many?

The answer may surprise you. In fact, if not in policy, there is no practical limit to the number of times you can recycle a place name.

The situation must have been perplexing to board members. They couldn’t win if they played by their rules.

There is about her quest a certain sense of inevitability.

People don’t play by the board’s rules.

Once Mrs. McDougall, who lives in McGregor Bay year round, began calling the lake that laps the rocks outside her house Patten Bay, and once she started holding her annual “Patten Bay Potluck” for everyone with a cottage on Patten Bay, well, Patten Bay began to sound like the real name of a real place.

Patten Bay.

An article about her quest in The Manitoulin Expositor (written by yours truly) made a printed record of Mrs. McDougall’s effort to place Patten Bay on the map.

It’s no stretch to say that all of us who own cottages on Patten Bay are calling the lake we swim in, fish in and drink from Patten Bay.

As the habit catches hold, more and more people beyond Patten Bay are calling it Patten Bay.

Patten Bay already is the name of the place, whether geographic naming officials recognize it or not.

I have to laugh at the thought that there might be too many places name for Patten.

How many would be too many?

For the Detroit Free Press a few years ago, I did a study of lake names next door to Ontario, in the state of Michigan.

Ontario has a way to go before the number of Patten Lakes and Patten Bays would top the number of lakes in Michigan that share a name.

The champion is Mud Lake.

How many Mud Lakes do you think there are?

264!

Second place goes to Twin Lakes — 124.

Or how about Long Lake? 77. Bass Lake: 69. Round Lake: 58, Grass Lake: 46.

Duplication was never a problem to the pioneers who settled Michigan in the 1800s. They liked “Cranberry” so well they hung the monicker on 44 lakes.

They got mixed up so often so often they named 34 lakes “Lost.”

“Lost” well describes the geographic names officials. This is a case they can’t win.

I’d advise Mrs. McDougall to give it a few years, then go back to the board.

Just in case tradition isn’t enough for the bureaucrats, I’d put a big sign alongside the lake that says Patten Bay.

Send a photo of the billboard to the board.

Here’s what they need to know:

They can erase a place from their map, but they can’t stamp it out of our minds.

Patten Bay is here to stay.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Bay | Leave a comment

Museum orchestras

Posted on February 28, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

“Museum orchestras.”

That’s what retired Wayne State Univesity music Prof. Martin Herman calls most major orchestras in the U.S.

Founded by Germans, playing mostly music by dead Germans, according to Prof. Herman.

Now, I love Bach, Haydn, Händel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and the rest of the unlaut gang of composers.

Hey, wait a minute! Wasn’t Mozart born in Salzburg? That would make him a dead Austrian!

Well, anyway, back in the day when I could count on performances of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra actually occurring as scheduled, I’d pick programs based on my favorite pieces by dead umlautists.

(What, you ask, is an “umlautist”? Why, it’s someone whose native language employs the umlaut, which consists of two horizontal dots over the vowels “a,”, “o,” and “u.” As in ä, ö, or ü. Far as I know, that language would be German.)

Let’s see, where was I?

Oh yes, dead German composers having their music played by live American orchestras.

I think there’s a flaw in Prof. Herman’s argument, but let’s follow it for now and see where it gets us.

Back to the days of yesteryear when my DSO program would arrive and I’d pick our concerts for the season.

Were they playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

Count on me.

Beethoven’s Ninth? Seventh? Third?

Oh, the blessed Third!

Mozart? The Requiem? The Fortieth Symphony? Any of the horn concertos?

I’ll be there.

But I understood Marty Herman’s point Saturday, February 26, 2011, when we listened to subgroups of the DSO known as the CutTime Players and CutTime Simfonica.

It was a concert to benefit striking DSO musicians, held at the First Presbyterian Church of Royal Oak in lieu of Orchestra Hall, where DSO musicians don’t have access because they’re picketing their prime venue.

The concert’s driving force was DSO double-bassist Rick Robinson.

While there were some pieces on the program by dead composers, none were Germans. But some of the composers were decidedly alive.

One of those living, breathing composers was Rick Robinson himself.

When I bought our tickets online, I didn’t know what the CutTime folks would be playing. Good enough for me that they are DSO musicians and the proceeds would benefit the musicians.

But I can’t help it. When I saw no death dates for some of the composers, I got nervous. How good can music by a live composer be? Really!

And four pieces by this guy Robinson!

Come on!

I braced for the inevitable — boredom interspersed with struggling against unpleasant noise.

As I say, now I understand what Prof. Herman was talking about.

Because I was not bored. Nor did I need to plug my ears.

Surprise! Classical music, or at least music in the classic style, is still being written.

Right here in metro Detroit.

I don’t think any competently composed music could sound bad in the hands of DSO people.

But this guy Robinson writes really good music.

The shame of it is that I needed a strike and a performance of DSO musicians not sanctioned and even condemned by DSO management to teach me the lesson.

Marty Herman’s point was that in the day when Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, et. al., were writing music, their audiences expected them to produce NEW works. That is why they cranked out hundreds, even thousands of pieces of music, mostly first-class, great listening stuff.

They were expected to entertain people with brand-new music.

Not present old pieces written by dead composers.

Somehow, that tradition has been lost or forgotten at our major orchestras.

But for the strike, I probably would never have heard Rick Robinson’s marvelous “City Trees,” or his “Gigue” with DSO principal oboist Donald Baker. Based on a Bach ‘cello tune, “Gigue” is a masterpiece of counterpoint, and while it sometimes evoked the great master, it was an original musical offering.

Robinson grew up in Highland Park when that city had a strong string program. He is a local guy composing world-class music.

What a treat, to hear newly-composed music. 

I’m afraid we’ve been trained to expect the oldie-goldie classical tunes, but I’ll start looking for programs with new pieces.

Beethoven’s Third?

Get it on CD.

Oh yes, the flaw in Prof. Herman’s logic?

Well, maybe not a flaw so  much as my personal objection.

When I picked DSO programs with, say, a favorite Bach piece, I’d often be foiled by the orchestra program directors, who’d pair the classic gem with something either more modern, or some piece unfamiliar to me.

And most often, the “new” piece was a treat, unexpectedly exciting.

So in that sense, I was hearing “new” music, even if it was, according to Prof. Herman, a museum piece.

A piece by an 18th-century composer could be brand-new to me if I’ve never heard it before.

It’s great to hear new music, even if it’s old.

Posted in Music, Unions | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

SHOESTRING REPORTER

Posted on February 27, 2011 by hro50ta1

By “Floyd Inkjet”

JOTR Book Critic

At last, someone has penned a book about Journalism that truly can be described as all these things — a personal memoir, a comprehensive strategy for building a Journalism career, a nuts-and-bolts textbook and, yes, a call to arms that could be fairly described as a Manifesto for Saving Journalism.

That is a lot of landscape for a 228-page volume, but this seminal book — Shoestring Reporter
— covers all that ground — and more.

But I may be doing an injustice to author Joel Thurtell’s latest literary effort by describing it as a mere “textbook.”

His new book, Shoestring Reporter, is so much more.

It certainly can be called a memoir, because the author describes the rise of his career from unpublished novelist to stringer for the South Bend Tribune and then staff writer with the Detroit Free Press.

And following MSNBC’s suspension of Keith Olbermann for donating money to political causes, Shoestring, it turns out, is very timely. It has an in-depth discussion of the “ethical” issues surrounding political donations by Journalists.

[In the interest of full disclosure, Thurtell is the owner and operator of this blog, joelontheroad.com; he commissioned this review, but gave this pseudonymous writer carte blanche with the promise that “not a word will be censored — ha-ha!”]

Thurtell provides his readers a literary road map for creating a career as a paid Journalist — without spending a nickel on traditional Journalism classes.

The book’s subtitle may frighten some Journalism profs: How I Got To be a Big City Reporter Without Going to J School and How You Can Do It Too. Does the author think that subtitle might be seen as a gauntlet tossed in front of Journalism teachers?

“No,” Thurtell told me, “I don’t believe that will happen. Journalism profs are a fair-minded lot. They teach all about balance and getting the story right. And the story about Shoestring is not only about the great things you can achieve as a Journalist. I also delve into the darker side of this great craft, warning budding Journalists about legal and ethical issues they’ll inevitably confront if they choose to follow the path of Journalism. That is to say, if they follow the path of honest, independent Journalists. J-school profs will find my book is a primer on the dark underside of news reporting.”

“I doubt another Journalism book has been written that takes a hard look at the troubles a working Journalist can suffer. And I offer solutions,” noted Thurtell.

Thurtell describes how he jump-starts his writing in the morning, how he’s learned to write at any time of day or night in most any situation. The author says he doesn’t believe in “writer’s block.” He gives detailed tips on locating editors who will pay for stories, tells how to approach them and how to use editors to find other editors, aka employers who will pay money for your written work.

But he goes much further, by describing a situation in which he, as a hunted Journalist, had armed police threatening to break down the door of his house because of flawed legal advice from a newspaper attorney intent on preventing Thurtell’s testimony in a criminal trial.

Thurtell also writes about his first experience as an investigative reporter, when he wrote a story so shattering to the status quo in a western Michigan community that the prosecutor mulled investigating the reporter.

How does a Journalist handle these situations? Shoestring Reporter has that story, too.

“Shoestring certainly is a personal memoir,” Thurtell told me. “As a Journalist, you can do things that ordinary mortals would never dream of. How about flying straight up in a US Navy Blue Angels fighter jet? How about facing an angry western diamondback rattlesnake or learning to fly the WJR-AM traffic helicopter?”

“Some of these adventures were scary, but man, I wouldn’t trade them for the more stable but less exciting life of a lawyer, teacher, accountant or plumber,” said Thurtell.

Shoestring Reporter is a delightful read even if you don’t want to become a Journalist. It’s a huge picture window view of how news people think and make decisions. And it’s funny!

Shoestring Reporter is published by Hardalee Press.

Posted in Books, Hardalee Press, People | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The “shared sacrifice” scam

Posted on February 26, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether another movie is made in Michigan.

If the nascent Michigan film industry folds up and moves because the state no longer singles this high-profile business class out for lucrative tax incentives, I wish them a good life.

Sorry, Jeff Daniels: Don’t let the door hit your ass.

Gov. Rick Snyder was right when he remarked that tax abatements to film-makers are a gift from the state — a subsidy, really, that must be made up with taxes on other businesses and individuals.

I’ve always been skeptical of tax abatements. The problem is that while the abatement, i.e., tax break,  is in effect, governments that depend on taxes to provided services are short-changed. And once the abatement goes away and the business has to pay taxes, it’s free to pull up stakes and find a more tax-friendly venue.

Besides the state government, the list of local governments, schools and authorities that depend on taxes is long: your city or township for starters, followed by local school districts, community colleges, libraries, parks programs in some cases (think Huron-Clinton MetroParks Authority) all receive funds from local taxes. When you give those “abatements” to film-makers or factories or, yes, even newspapers, you are reducing the overall level of revenue that supports government agencies we depend on.

I’ve never been impressed with the role of so-called tax increment financing schemes and the myriad Downtown Development Authorities, either. When I see those fancy brick sidewalks and cute antique-looking street lamps, I wonder how much less our local schools got thanks to the bleed-off to the DDA.

So I’m with the governor when he points out that giving tax credits to film companies is not a free gift. The money comes out of state revenues.

But here’s where I have a problem: The governor speaks of “shared sacrifice.”

His logic doesn’t hold if he takes tax cuts from one group and gives them to another.

How can it be “shared sacrifice” if he’s handing $1.8 billion of tax cuts to businesses while adding to the tax burden of everyone else?

He refutes his own argument against the film industry tax credit when he takes from one and gives to another.

This is a logical conundrum the governor and his Republican party need to address.

Now.

If they don’t, the issue will come back to haunt them.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Bad government | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

‘Qaddafi’, ‘Gaddafi’ or ‘Kaddafi?’

Posted on February 26, 2011 by hro50ta1

Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, one of Colonel Gaddafi‘s top security official (sic) and cousin, left Wednesday evening, it was revealed, for Egypt, where he denounced Colonel Qaddafi‘s “grave violations to human rights.”

— The New York Times, February 26, 2011

By Joel Thurtell

Would I be asking too much if I pleaded with journalists and their parent organizations to agree on one spelling of Colonel ‘Qaddafi’ or ‘Gaddafi’ or ‘Kaddafi’?

The New York Times authors and editors who produced the paper’s February 26, 2011 front-page article, “Qaddafi Forces Violently Quell Capital Protest,” themselves were confused, using two different spellings (Gaddafi and Qaddafi) in a single sentence. By 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, February 26, Times editors had not corrected the mistake, which lingered in the online version of the story. They also had not fixed the singular-plural error.

Supposedly, there is no accepted way of transliterating Arabic words into English, and therefore we have a proliferation of English spellings, with the Library of Congress counting 72 variants and ABC News putting it at 112 forms. Even the colonel’s website spells his name different ways.

Hanging the blame on a website or linguistic ambiguity is no excuse for English-speaking writers and editors not to find a single spelling they can agree on.

Work on it, folks! This is not rocket science.

Personally, I’d reject “Gaddafi’ out of hand. The “g” sound is too soft.

“Qaddafi” and “Kaddafi” are at least harmonized in a harder sound.

Of the two, I prefer “Kaddafi,” because “k” has a hard sound both aurally and visually.

And as we know, the colonel is a hardass kind of guy.

Does my argument sound like a bunch of baloney?

Well, that’s what it is.

But I’m afraid any rationale for choosing one spelling over another will contain elements, if not great swamploads, of bullshit.

So be it.

We need an agreement.

When I told my wife about this column, she laughed: “Your second-grade teacher would be proud of you!”

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Joel's J School | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Please don’t go to this concert!

Posted on February 23, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Striking musicians from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are giving a concert this weekend.

Please don’t go!

It’s Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 8 p.m. in the First Presbyterian Church of Royal Oak, 529 Hendrie Boulevard, Royal Oak, MI.

I’m not gonna tell you any more about it, because DSO management, the geniuses who forced the musicians to strike last fall, are unhappy that the musicians are giving concerts. They say DSO strikers are taking money from the impoverished DSO.

So please don’t go.

You wouldn’t want to make Anne Parsons mad.

Anne Parsons is the CEO of the Detroit orchestra. She makes $400,000 a year. She wanted the musicians to take huge cuts in pay and benefits after she and her chronically incompetent DSO board did their best to gamble away the orchestra’s endowment. Wasn’t that neat? They raised the $60 million needed to build the Max Fisher addition to Orchestra Hall, but instead of using the money to pay contractors, they invested it in the stock market and instead borrowed money to pay for construction. You know what happened: In 2008, the stock market tanked, and the DSO board is robbing its endowment to repay $3 million a year in bond debt. Was this smart?

So, if the DSO is broke, they’re the ones that made it so.

Now, they don’t want you to attend concerts by striking DSO musicians.

Can you blame them?

A normal person, one with a functioning conscience, would be ashamed of having frittered away the orchestra’s nest egg.

But Anne Parsons wants you to think the musicians are greedy.

Remember, she wants the musicians to give up salary and benefits, and she’s pulling down four hundred grand a year.

So please, do what Anne Parsons would like you to do: Boycott the DSO musicians’ concerts.

By the way, this concert on Saturday sounds great.

I don’t know what pieces they’re playing, but all I need to know is that it features the Cut Time Players, CutTime Simfonica and the Brazeal Dennard Chorale. Each group is made up of brilliant DSO musicians.

Sorry, I got carried away. Please don’t buy tickets! Anne Parsons would not be happy with you.

She makes $400,000 a year and wants other people to take pay cuts.

Tickets:

$20 General Admission

$50 Premium Seating

Ticket Hotline: 248-860-6786

They take Paypal or credit cards in advance, or cash and checks at the door.

Please don’t go to this concert!

Not only will you make Anne Parsons happy.

But if you stay away, I’ll get a better seat!

Posted in Music, Unions | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Crappy meeting

Posted on February 23, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

If you’re concerned about pollution in the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, there’s an important meeting tonight.

The Department of Natural Resources and Environment will be discussing changes in permits for pollution levels the government will allow at Detroit’s wastewater treatment plant.

The plant is the biggest single-unit wastewater plant in North America, and it dumps billions of gallons of untreated sewage into the rivers every year.

The meeting is today, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 7 p.m. in Southwestern High School, 6921 West Fort Street, Detroit.

There likely will be “objections to proposed modifications to federal pollution discharge permits for the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant,” according to a press release from the Michigan Environmental Council.

“The proposed permit changes under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) fail to ensure significant progress toward eliminating sewage discharges to the Great Lakes,” according to MEC. “The Detroit sewer system annually releases billions of gallons of virtually untreated, diluted sewage to the Great Lakes system.”

I reported on this in the Detroit Free Press before I retired in 2007. The book I wrote with photos by Free Press photographer Patricia Beck, UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER (Wayne State University Press, 2009) discussed this problem, as did an article I wrote in the December 10, 2008 Metro Times, “Measuring the Rouge.”

When I was writing for the Free Press, the Wayne County Department of Environment (now defunct) claimed raw sewage discharges to the Rouge River had been reduced to 2 billion gallons a year. That was a lie. Thanks to Detroit Riverkeeper Robert Burns, I acquired data he’d gotten from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department showing that the discharges amounted to at least eight times what Wayne County claimed.

I’m curious to learn what “changes” we’re going to see in those discharge permits.

In 1985, environmental officials promised the Rouge River would be “swimmable and fishable” by 2005. However, a study of E. coli in the Rouge in 2005 showed the river was safe for human contact 2-5 percent of the time.

By 2006, government had spent nearly $2 billion supposedly cleaning the Rouge.

Despite all kinds of fanfare and celebrations, with the claim by one Rouge official that the battle was won and the river is “swimmable,” the Rouge is still nothing more than an open sewer.

I can’t wait to hear what officials have to say at tonight’s meeting.

Posted in Adventures on the Rouge | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Tone deaf

Posted on February 23, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

My mistake.

Dave Bing must be mayor of Kalamazoo.

Or maybe Traverse City.

Now that I think of it, Ironwood in the far-off Upper Peninsula is more likely.

He can’t possibly be mayor of Detroit, which is what I erroneously thought he was.

If Dave Bing were mayor of Detroit, he’d have known that Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians have been on strike for 21 weeks.

He’d have known that striking DSO musicians are picketing Orchestra Hall on Woodward not too terribly far from the mayor’s office.

And knowing of the musicians’ strike, he would not have been so callous as to schedule a major speech in Orchestra Hall, thus requiring him not only to cross the picket line, but to issue an incredibly lame excuse for doing so.

Musicians, he argued, were too late asking him to find another venue. It would be logistically impossible so soon before yesterday’s speech (February 22, 2011) to move his State of the City address.

No mayor of Detroit with an ounce of compassion for the human beings who make up our wonderful Detroit orchestra would have dreamed of setting foot in Orchestra Hall.

No true mayor of Detroit would have needed a request from musicians to understand that he’d be speaking in a place that is under moral siege.

A real mayor of Detroit would have known intuitively that to go to Orchestra Hall, crossing the picket line, would be a poke in the eye to the striking musicians and a grand show of support to the DSO board and managers whose financial shenanigans have placed the orchestra’s future in dire straits.

A true mayor of Detroit would simply not have conceived of such a brazenly contemptuous sneer at working people.

That’s why I think Dave Bing must be mayor of some other town — any place but Detroit.

Posted in Music, Unions | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

How to wreck an orchestra

Posted on February 22, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Start with a world-class orchestra, one ranked in the top 10 in the United States.

What would be the easiest way to destroy such a beacon of musicianship?

Well, you could provoke a strike of musicians, and then blame the end of concerts on musicians and their union.

Americans mostly love to bash unions, and it’s a position our newspapers easily adopt, since they are businesses that don’t like unionized workers any more than the management of a symphony orchestra likes them.

But this is only a thumbnail scenario. It doesn’t capture the whole essence of what has been happening with the strike of musicians at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Management forces workers to strike, then blames the strike on workers. News media — with their own distaste for unions and local history of labor-bashing — pretty much swallow management’s line, even editorializing against the musicians.

If you want to understand what’s been going on at the DSO, forget the News. Check out the musicians’ website.

My wife and I were DSO season ticket-holders for many years. As soon as we heard the musicians had struck, we demanded a refund of our ticket money. I wrote a letter to CEO Anne Parsons explaining that I would not buy tickets to the orchestra again until management had bargained a fair contract with DSO musicians.

That was in October, 2010.

It’s February, 2011, and DSO management still has not bargained a fair contract with its musicians. Instead, it has prolonged the strike and meanwhile dumped the remainder of its 2010-2011 concert schedule.

DSO management pretends those greedy musicians are to blame.

We got our DSO refund, but never got a response from Parsons, the DSO’s $400,000-a-year CEO.

It’s late February, 2011, and now I understand why Parsons never answered my request that she and the DSO board deal fairly with the musicians.

Her silence tells me she and the board never intended to give the musicians a square deal.

Why?

Because Parsons and the board have dug a huge financial pit for this once-splendid orchestra, and they need to rip huge and unreasonable concessions from the musicians in order to stave off the DSO’s bankruptcy.

That’s what I said: bankruptcy.

In the eyes of its creditors, the DSO is insolvent.

You can read about this unsung libretto in more detail at the musicians’ website. DSO oboist Shelley Heron and clarinetist Doug Cornelsen have laid out the history of bungling and incompetence by DSO management over the past few years.

The problems arose from botched fundraising and a financial plan that was just plain imbecilic.

It is the duty of world-class musicians like Cornelsen and Heron to put on fabulous concerts. Musicians should not be held accountable for managers’ fundraising failures.

It is the duty of $400,000-a-year CEOs to make sure fundraising is done properly and financial plans are kept within the realm of sanity.

Over very few years, the DSO management allowed its base of donors to erode from 25,000 to 5,000. More and more it relied on wealthy members of its board to ante up when fundraising fell short.

Why did the DSO fail at raising money? For a number of years, fundraising went on with great success. But when the two DSO officials in charge of fundraising departed, they were succeeded by new money-raisers propelled by Orchestra Halls’s revolving doors.

Eight fundraising heads came and went in four years.

It was deemed easier to hit the rich few for money rather than expend the effort to broaden the donor base.

But failure to meet fundraising goals was only part of the problem.

When the DSO proposed a $60 million addition to Orchestra Hall known as “The Max” after benefactor Max Fisher, enough money was raised to pay for construction of the new building.

But instead of paying for the project from money it collected from donors, DSO management chose to bet the money on the stock market. They speculated that they could parley donors’ money into even more money and tap interest on their endowment to pay for construction of the new building in addition to regular operating costs.

DSO bosses might as well have trusted donors’ money to a casino.

In 2008, the stock market tanked.

Meanwhile, the DSO has been tapping principal of its endowment to meet $3 million-a-year payments on bonds it used to finance The Max.

In January of 2010, a group of banks holding DSO debt pointed out that tapping principal is draining collateral the DSO used to secure its debt. The banks started to make noise about foreclosure.

That’s when DSO managers, led by the orchestra’s $400,000-a-year CEO Parsons, started beating on the musicians to give up salary, pension and health benefits with added time doing community outreach aimed at achieving the fundraising that was Parson’s job.

So the DSO strike is not really about musicians’ salaries and benefits.

It’s about DSO managers’ attempts to hide their own incompetence by charging the consequences of their ill-advised financial arrangements to the musicians.

This is not an explanation you’ll read about in The Detroit News, which loves to bash strikers.

But it helps to understand how a world-class orchestra could get into such a mess.

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