From the Dow Kokam groundbreaking ceremony last June
Linkage I've been saving up. Could not sleep at all last night - it was still in the mid-80s at 2AM - so you get this today.
Great article about job creation in Midland features the renewable energy jobs being created by Dow. Dow broke ground this week on the new Midland facility that will manufacture the Powerhouse Solar Shingle - but they have pushed the launch of the product back to the fourth quarter of this year. Slow housing market can't be helping there.
The Dow Kokam battery plant was 70% done as of last April and plans to open in 2012, and a few weeks ago it was announced that Delta College will train 750 workers for the facility. They are on the way...
Yes, Michigan was out of the recession in 2010. "After two years of shrinking, the state's economy grew 2.9% last year, faster than the national average of 2.6%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis." Michigan was the 15th fastest growing state in the country last year. What did it? Durable goods manufacturing - read autos - accounted for 1.47% of the state's growth. Good thing we didn't let them liquidate, eh Mittens?
Rick Haglund tells us that numbers guru state demographer Ken Darga thinks the double-dip recession of the early 80s was worse than the period we just went through. I wondered that same thing at the end of '09, and found our jobless rate averaged higher during the 80s as well - but take his word for it, because I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to statistics.
The Freep is starting a summer long series of the economics surrounding the water in the Great Lakes. Good pictures, good read, check it out.
Last year, Republicans in the legislature demanded we cut government. No tax increases, ever!, they said, and early retirements were offered to trim the budget. Now, the SOS has a backlog on business licensing due to lack of personnel, and I'll give you three guesses on who is complaining about that. Your first two don't count.
The Recovery Act is still stimulating: 24 of Michigan's lowest achieving schools won grants through the School Improvement Grant (SIG) awards to help them implement plans for a turnaround. Stimulus money is also planting trees in Detroit through the DNR/US Forest Service. The nonprofit organization The Greening of Detroit, who also gets backing from such folks as DTE, hopes to plant 3,500 trees this season. Thank the nice President, because your state government certainly isn't going to help us out.
More help coming from the feds, this time from the EPA to clean up seven contaminated brownfield areas in Michigan. $2.9 million is coming our way, $1 million of that goes to Lansing alone. Since the mid-90s, the EPA brownfield grants have cleaned 20,300 acres of property.
It looks like Catherine Ferguson Academy, the Detroit school for pregnant and teen mothers that graduates 90% of its students and has a 100% college acceptance rate, is going to close. What a tragedy. "Forty-seven young women graduated in the class of 2011 — 46 headed for college and one for the U.S. Marines Corps." Rachel Maddow has more.
The Tea Party thugs from the Koch group Americans for Prosperity tacked fake eviction notices to homes in Detroit's Delray district yesterday, leading to many confused and upset people, as you can imagine. Does Moroun actually think that wins him friends around there? Or anywhere? He denies involvement, of course. And hey look, he really is putting windows in at Michigan Central! What a guy! Build the government bridge already.
That's all for now - and remember kids, it's not sex, it's the lying about sex that is the problem. Think before you tweet. Or something. Better yet, don't cheat on your partner in the first place. And have a nice day.