Bailout Watch 282: DetN's Howes Promises Payback

I’ve been watching the polemics coming from the media within Fortress Detroit with increasing fascination. As the bailout bill has stumbled, faltered and face planted; the hometown cheerleaders’ tone has evolved from arrogant and bombastic, to arrogant and vindictive, to plain old vindictive. Detroit News carmudgeon Daniel Howes has always been one of the less aggressive of this cohort. His commentary has consisted of equal parts commiseration, head shaking and exhortation. Now that the Detroit bailout bill is DOA, Howes is struggling to put what Jalopnik calls the “carpocolpyse” into palatable perspective. Last night’s column, written as the bill went up in flames, frames the defeat as a North – South deal. “[The unions’ Political Action Committees] ignored the Republicans, even auto state Republicans, who represent the so-called ‘New American Manufacturers’ in places such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama… Stripped bare and put in the regional context of union vs. nonunion and domestic vs. foreign, the toughened conditions pushed by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., are legislative cruise missiles aimed directly at Detroit’s business model, the UAW’s Solidarity House and 70 years of Big Three bargaining tradition.” While Howes considers Southern senators’ attempt to force the UAW to modernize is “understandable,” given “given Detroit’s glacial pace of change,” he predicts bad, bad things. In that “don’t tug on the tiger’s tail” kinda way…

“The president-elect and the congressional Democrats all have signaled a willingness to pass labor’s top legislative priority — the so-called ‘card check’ legislation, which would essentially abolish secret ballots and make organizing easier. Everywhere. If it passes, I’m betting the first stops on the UAW’s southern swing will be auto plants in Shelby’s Alabama and Corker’s Tennessee, soon to be home to Volkswagen AG’s first U.S. plant in a generation.”

In other words, as humiliated Union Boss Karl Rojek said in “My Favorite Year,” the fightin’s in rounds. Only if I were a betting man, I’d know which side I’d bet on.