I was reminded recently about how our dear Senator Debbie Stabenow has been at odds with the pharmaceutical companies for years now, threatening to go after them (remember the highly-publicized excursion where she took bus-loads of seniors over to Windsor to get their medications?). You don't think maybe, just maybe the subject of Ms. Stabenow and her anti-drug company crusade came up at high-level meetings where Pfizer execs decided where and in what states they were going to maintain facilities, do you? In the end they voted with their dollars, just like we all do and I don't blame them. Why should they continue to do business in a state where one of it's top elected officials' publicly stated goals is to punish them?
Nice going Debbie. Thanks a lot. Now do us big favor, will you? Don't do anything the rest of your current term in office. Nothing. Just go to your office everyday, collect your fat government paycheck and try not to mess anything else up, okay?
How that woman's constituents find her worthy of being re-elected over and over again is beyond me.
Attack on drug companies will send jobs out of state
For some strange reason I don't think this is quite what Governor Granholm had in mind when it comes to attracting businesses to and keeping businesses in the State if Michigan.
Yep, Michigan Democrats are doing a bang-up job, aren't they?
6 comments:
Why, Six, I'm surprised at you!
I would think you were happy with Stabenow's performance since she supported your president in his bid to legalize torture by saying, "yes" to the Military Comissions Act of 2006.
Of course Pfizer voted with their dollars. That's what pharmaceutical companies do. They certainly aren't in the business of helping or healing people, are they?
And isn't it just like the corporate mouthpiece Detroit News to advocate against lowering insanely high drug prices when poor and elderly people are the ones who need medicine the most?
Most industrialized nations have the sense to fight skyrocketing health care costs. Greedy US politicians get checks and oxycotin under the table so they will keep drug profits high.
Six, your president wants to tax your corporate paid health benefits to provide a tax break for lower income folks to buy "basic" health coverage. This will prompt your company to limit your health benefits (which have probably been lowered every year for the last five years), and it still won't provide enough money for uninsured Americans to get coverage of their own.
Is this smart policy to you?
Six: I'm totally with you on this, and had the same reaction when I heard that this company was moving.
Nadir:
1. Six opposed Bush's torture policy.
2. Bush is your president also.
3. Governments cannot mandate prices of anything... at least not without adversely affecting quality and/or availability. For example: those petro stations advertising their empty pumps at pre-catastrophe prices, or empty shelves with pre-catastrophe water bottle prices, thanks to those "anti-gauging" price-control laws you embrace. Wage and price controls of healthcare in other nations have caused problems that we have discussed previously in this forum; poor and old people have better options than government programs, in my opinion.
4. I am disgusted that your and my president Bush wants to raise healthcare taxes.
I see no inherent reason for Michigan and Detroit to not join the other thriving north eastern states / cities, except for their own political policies. What did Chicago do to succeed where Detroit has failed? Both cities had racial riots at the same time, lost white residents, and elected black mayors. But the black mayor of Chicago (Harold Washington) got all the honkies to return, and he turned Chicago from a barren and despised city into a great one. NYC also had the same type of success under similar circumstances (black mayor Dinkins), as did Atlanta (various black mayors).
Somehow Detroit and Washinton, DC did something different.
Washington DC is a colony within the US. It's politicians to a great extent can't affect a lot of the policies in the city.
But have you been to DC lately? Many parts of the city are almost all white.
Detroit has been thwarted by the flight of capital from the city. There are still attempts to regentrify the city's downtown, but Michiganders are racially polarized. Many white folks are afraid to be in south of 8 Mile or east of Telegraph after dark.
The area's dependence on the automotive industry has been a big hinderance since the big three are on the decline. Detroit needs diversity of all kinds in the worst way.
Effective mass transit is the answer to revitalize all of Southeastern Michigan. GM and Ford should convert closed plants to light rail production and start by building trains from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Flint and Toledo. This would create jobs and provide safe, inexpensive public transportation for the cities poor residents.
I pretty much agree with Nadir's assessment. Some of Detroit's problems I trace back to when honkies ran the city:
1. Dismantling Detroit's rail transit system.
2. Building on Detroit's otherwise gorgeous downtown riverway, instead of taking the approach of Chicago's leaders during the same time. Chicago reserved its Lake Michigan downtown front for public parks, and the nearest street running parallel to the lake has nothing but parkland, so drivers all see Chicago's water. In Detroit, the idiot leaders back in those days developed buildings all the way to the river's edge, so when you go downtown you don't even know that a river is there.
These are two special problems Detroit faces that Chicago doesn't.
I am not sure about DC. I have visited a few times in recent years and know that it has wonderful nice Chicago-like spots, and of course some fantastic black - majority subdivisions in the suburbs. But I thought that it had some pervasive problems like a very horrible school system.
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