THE LOCAL AREA WATCH

IT'S THE TAXPAYERS, NOT THE VOTERS, WHO GOT SHAFTED BY MICHIGAN'S EARLY PRIMARY

Now that it looks like a re-do of the Michigan Democratic presidential primary is in the dustbin, it's time to sort through this mess.

There's been a lot of huffing and puffing over how the national Republican and (especially) Democratic parties "disenfranchised" Michigan presidential primary voters.  Of course, the state, not national, party organizations have themselves to blame.  The national organizations laid down the rules on scheduling primaries.  They permitted only a few states to hold primaries or caucuses ahead of "Super Tuesday" on February 5th.  They clearly warned the state organizations that holding an early primary would result in some or even all of the selected delegates not being seated at this summer's presidential conventions.

Nevertheless, Michigan Republicans and Democrats blundered forward with an early primary in plain violation of the national party rules -- and now are paying the price for it.  Because the Republican presidential nominee is a settled matter, no one on that side of the aisle cares anymore.  However, the Democrats still have a tight race for the nomination, and so Michigan delegates now might matter if they are seated.  Thus, the sound and fury during the past few weeks about the Democratic national party "disenfranchising" Michigan voters if either the national party doesn't seat the delegates chosen in the renegade primary or the voters don't get another primary to chose again.

The first big piece of clutter to clear out of the way is that voters have NO constitutional right to choose a political party's nominee for public office.  Political parties can pick their nominees any way they want, whether it's a primary, a caucus, a convention, or a smoke-filled room.  Whether or not it is savvy, reasonable, or fair for a political party to use one method instead of another is not the point.  The First Amendment freedom of association is.  So, the Republican and Democratic national parties can dictate any rules they deem fit for determining who their presidential nominees will be.  If they want to exercise control over the primary calendar (which, in light of how the Democratic contest is playing out, trying to prevent a front-loaded calendar seems not to have been such a bad idea), they can do so.

And if they want to penalize state parties that violate that schedule, they can do so.  It should be clear to everyone by now that this is a hard fact of life.  The courts have repeatedly refused to get into this mess, because they know they have no jurisdiction over the matter.  So why all the hullabaloo directed at the national parties?  Why aren't we thoroughly ticked off with the Michigan Republicans and Democrats who took our tax dollars to hold presidential primaries to chose delegates who would not be seated at the summer conventions?  They are the ones who took $10 million from taxpayer wallets to hold a meaningless event -- indeed, an event they knew was meaningless at the time.

In fact, why do the taxpayers even pay for political party contests in the first place?  How is it that we are obliged to subsidize the nomination process of the Republican and Democratic parties over which, by their First Amendment rights, we have no control?  Primaries might well be a good way for parties to select their nominees, but let them and not the taxpayers pay for it.  Meanwhile, keep in mind those state pols who blew your money on a pointless presidential primary the next time he or she is trolling for your vote.

G.R. COMMISSIONER WANTS CITIZEN WORK GANGS TO REPAIR POTHOLES

Yesterday the Grand Rapids City Politburo -- I mean, Commission -- met and discussed the potholes that are reducing our streets to rubble and our cars to wrecks.  There was the usual griping that city apparatchiks haven't confiscated enough of the bourgeoise's wealth to pay for capitalistic excesses like pothole repairs.  So, Second Ward Commissar David LaGrand proposed a corvee!  Yes, a corvee, labor exacted in lieu of taxes to build or repair highways.

I kid you not, folks.  WOOD TV-8 News reported that LaGrand recommended giving local residents a shovel and a bucket of tar to repair our potholed streets.  Nothing like a bit of old school workers' paradise to fix a problem that the government is too incompetent to remedy.  Heck, if the Soviets managed to bring in the harvest by hustling people out of their offices and factories into the countryside to do what the state collectives couldn't get done, why not give it a try in River City?

No doubt LaGrand would object that he was calling for volunteers.  Well, I'll go along with that so long as payment of city taxes is also voluntary.

LOCAL BOY HITS JACKPOT AT SINKING FIFTH THIRD

Kevin Kabat rose through the ranks of that venerable West Michigan institution, Old Kent Bank & Trust, and played a key role in suppressing a shareholder revolt when the big bank from Cincinnati, Fifth Third Bancorp, gobbled it up in April 2001.  Two years later, after Fifth Third reduced Old Kent to its Michigan subsidiary and then ousted its discredited mole, David Wagner, from the top spot there, Kabat took the reins of Fifth Third-Michigan.  Then last April, Kabat was rewarded for keeping the Fifth Third-Old Kent merger skeleton in the closet with promotion to chief executive officer of the entire bank.  So he packed his bags and moved to Cincinnati.

Now we learn from the Securities & Exchange Commission that after less than a year running the show at Fifth Third Bancorp, the board of directors paid him $10 million in 2007.  That includes a base salary of $866,534, perks and benefits totaling $140,400 such as $28,682 in country club dues, a $3,000,0000 performance bonus, and $6,000,000 in Fifth Third stock and options.  So Kabat bagged $10 million while his shareholders got what in 2007?  Well, Fifth Third's stock (ticker symbol: FITB) plummeted from a high of $43.32 a share in 2007 to $22.13 a share this morning.  That wiped out about $10 or $12 billion in shareholder value since Kabat took over.

Well, maybe Kabat deserved his big payday, because in a tough market, he had managed Fifth Third better than its competitors.  Sounds good.  However, there's the inconvenient fact that Fifth Third's performance ranking has been at or near the bottom of the top fifty largest banks in the U.S.  The big bank from Cincinnati continues to sink after the Federal Reserve put the kibosh on ex-CEO George Schaefer's running-on-water strategy designed to outpace the discovery of irregularities in Fifth Third's acquisitions of competitors, especially Old Kent.

And do not doubt that Kabat won a jackpot from the directors.  Even Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric did not make as much as Kabat.  GE's directors paid him only $9.1 million for running a company with a shareholder value thirty times the size of Fifth Third.  If Kabat had been paid accordingly, he would not have even earned half of his base salary.  It appears that our local boy is still collecting from grateful Fifth Third's directors for keeping shareholders in the dark about the crooked deals surrounding the Fifth Third-Old Kent merger, such as Toxic Towers.

THE STORY OF JACK CROFOOT

Jack Crofoot is a bad man.  So bad he needs to be locked up in the joint.  At least that's what Spartan Stores, their attorneys at Warner Norcross, the Grand Rapids City Attorney's office, and apparently even Mr. Crofoot's public defender want you to think.  What did this bad man do?

Mr. Crofoot was a regular patron of Spartan's Family Fare grocery store near the intersection of 44th Street and Breton.  One day he missed a couple of items in his grocery cart when he checked out.  Before leaving the store, he noticed one of them, a bottle of bleach, and then went back and paid for it.  Then immediately after exiting the store, he noticed the other item, a bottle of rum he purchased for a family member.  (Mr. Crofoot doesn't drink.)  As he headed back into the store to pay for that, the store's security guard detained him and refused to let him do so.

Mr. Crofoot missed the bleach and the rum at the check-out because they were out of sight in his cart, and you see, folks, he is legally blind.  However, the Spartan rent-a-cop scoffed at his blindness and demanded that he sign documents confessing to theft.  Mr. Crofoot refused, and the rent-a-cop called in the Grand Rapids police.  As it happens, the rent-a-cop was also a cadet with the GRPD, so he had an incentive to make it appear to his colleague in blue that he was making a good bust and not a screw-up.  As it also happens, this conflict of interest is the very reason why the City of Grand Rapids prohibits its police officers from moonlighting as security guards within the city limits.  (More on that below.)

So the Spartan rent-a-cop persuaded his brother officer to cite Mr. Crofoot for shoplifting.  Understandably, Mr. Crofoot was unhappy about this and had the gall to complain.  In fact, his complaint did get the attention of Spartan's manager for security who then reviewed the store's surveillance video of the incident.  He concluded that Mr. Crofoot had told the truth and committed no theft.  So the security manager contacted the Grand Rapids City Attorney's office to drop the charges.  However, Assistant City Attorney Margaret Bloemers refused.

She was miffed that Mr. Crofoot had made a public complaint about the Spartan rent-a-cop's conflict of interest, which forced the GRPD to enforce the moonlighting regulations that its cadet had been violating.  So, Ms. Bloemers, who serves as the GRPD's legal adviser, decided to make an example out of Mr. Crofoot and show us slack-jawed yokels that we had better not get uppity when the cops make a mistake.  She pressed on with his prosecution in the city's district court.

Meanwhile, Spartan's security manager had been overridden by the grocery store chain's hired gun, Alex DeYonker of the law firm Warner Norcross & Judd.  Mr. Crofoot's public complaints about Spartan tarring his name with an unjust prosecution raised the prospect that he might have a meritorious lawsuit against the grocery store.  Thus, Mr. DeYonker decided to deter that prospect by bullying Mr. Crofoot into submission.  So instead of giving the man a simple apology and gesture of goodwill as the security manager had originally offered, Spartan's jackal -- ahem, Mr. DeYonker -- decided is was best to hold a suspension of the prosecution (rather than an outright dismissal of it) over Mr. Crofoot's head until he knuckled under to Spartan's settlement terms.

Mr. Crofoot didn't agree, because he wanted his name cleared.  So Spartan, Warner Norcross, and the City Attorney's office proceeded with his prosecution.  Living on a fixed income, Mr. Crofoot needed a public defender and the district court assigned one to him.  Unfortunately for him, his lawyer was one of those operators who collects his fee from the public defender's office and then does as little as he can get away with in exchange for it.  In fact, he told Mr. Crofoot that he would not enter a plea of "not guilty" on his behalf because it wasn't worth the trouble.  He claimed that he had already met with the judge who was determined to convict him.  Unsurprisingly, Mr. Crofoot made a big stink about this:  He wanted his lawyer to defend him!  Finally, his lawyer relented and agree to enter a "not guilty" plea, but he would not do any work toward his defense -- for example, subpoenaing the store's video surveillance tape or the security manager and the store clerks to appear as witnesses.  Mr. Crofoot's lawyer explained that such case preparation would take too much trouble.

Of course, we can all marvel at the absurdity of this.  However, Mr. Crofoot faces the prospect of doing time, because everyone who should be putting things right by Mr. Crofoot has instead chosen to serve crass, rotten, venial interests that profit by his conviction, as unjust as that may be:

[1] The Spartan security guard vilified Mr. Crofoot to make himself look good to his superiors at the GRPD;

[2] Spartan and Warner Norcross have chosen to run a customer through a ruinious process to crush any prospect of a lawsuit for falsely detaining and defaming him as a thief;

[3] The City Attorney's office has put petty bureaucratic solidarity ahead of justice to smack down a citizen who rightly complained of a police officer's conflict of interest in the matter; and

[4] His public defender is peeved that his client should be so unruly as to demand that he actually defend him and so make him work for his fee.

Mr. Crofoot's real crime, folks, is that he had the temerity to complain when wronged.  He had the nerve to hold people accountable to the rules they claim to abide by.  He had the unmitigated gall to demand that his name be cleared by those tarring it.  Instead of fixing the problem, the Spartan security guard, Spartan Stores, Warner Norcross, the City Attorney's office, and his public defender chose to vindicate themselves at his expense -- which may end up including a jail sentence.  Their craven cowardice in refusing to admit a wrong to falsely justify themselves -- especially those who hold a public trust, like Assistant City Attorney Bloemers and Mr. Crofoot's public defender -- is despicable.

Such is the rule of petty bullies in River City and the supine go-along-to-get-along culture of our public officials, watchdogs, and local media that lets them get away with it.