G4G Talking Points for 09-25

[SharonRB]

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 (43 Days until Victory 2006)

"In a year when Michigan has been going through such a structure shift, in a year when the auto industry has been going through such a structure shift, this is great news. We want to send a message to the world that if you want to build a car engine and you want to use the most skilled workers, you want to go to Michigan." – Governor Granholm talking to hundreds of workers at the opening of a GM plant in Flint that will make a new, more efficient V-6 engine.

The Granholm campaign has a new ad out this morning touting Governor Granholm’s efforts to bring Toyota to Michigan – she succeeded in getting the company to invest $187 million in two new state of the art research and development facilities, creating 600 new jobs. Click here for more details and to view the ad…http://www.granholmforgov.com/site/PageServer?pagename=toyota


Next week, the increase in the minimum wage that Governor Granholm signed into law will take effect, raising wages from $5.15 an hour to $6.95 and hour. Later on, it will rise to $7.40.


This will put more than $4,500 a year into the pockets of every full time minimum wage worker. Over 460,000 Michigan workers will benefit from the wage increase.


On Friday, the Governor signed into law a new tax credit that will put as much as $880 a year in the pockets of more than 660,000 working families who make $35,000 a year or less.

Headlines from Around the State

Mount Pleasant Sun Column: DeVos' true colors pop out
It's not much of a surprise to learn that Dick DeVos is a Creationist. . . . The incumbent governor's lead in the polls isn't huge, and the revelation that her opponent doubts Darwin is bound to cause him problems, especially among pragmatic conservatives who understand that the evolution issue isn't Left-Right, but about what constitutes good science. . . . Whether the revelation will have any lasting impact on the race is still to be seen, although a couple of people who'd planned to vote Republican told me that this has changed their vote. Michigan voters tend to be leery of extremists, and this is an extremist position. When it comes to science, in fact, it's about as extremist as they come. . . . But, mostly this calls into question DeVos' ability to properly engage science. He's already on record as opposing embryonic stem cell research. The two - stem cells and evolution - don't provide reason for a rosy prediction. In fact, it raises serious questions about his abilities. Good science provides the necessary discipline for innovation. Would DeVos be the right person to extend as Michigan's ambassador to health sciences innovators? . . . In fact, it's one of the few things on which he's been specific. But, he did get specific - even if the truth wasn't a terribly shocking revelation. But, lucky us, after months of complaining about his lack of details, we finally have an idea of what to expect from a Gov. Dick DeVos.
Click here to read the full column... http://www.themorningsun.com/stories/092206/loc_devos001.shtml

Detroit Free Press: DeVos' run puts Amway in spotlight
Almost off the campaign radar has been what some critics say should be the larger question about DeVos: his unabashed promotion of Amway's system of selling what it calls "soap and hope," recruiting ordinary Americans with no sales background to sell products with the promise that hard work can produce great wealth. DeVos touted the Amway distributorships in a 1998 speech in California as "the best business opportunity in the world," even as the average active distributor grosses very little -- just $115 a month, according to promotional material given to new distributors. In the United States and Canada, Alticor's 370,000 distributors shared $345 million in bonus and incentive payments in 2005, the company said. The Federal Trade Commission investigated Amway in the late 1970s and concluded that the company was not an illegal pyramid scheme, but the FTC also found that it misled potential distributors and ordered the company in 1979 to spell out how much money distributors earn. As a result, current promotional materials say that only 2 of 1,000 distributors will earn $47,000 a year and 3 in 10,000 will earn $72,000. "This is an extremely contentious, controversial business model," said Robert FitzPatrick, a business consultant and consumer advocate based in Charlotte, N.C., and the author of "False Profits," a critical examination of Amway and similar so-called multilevel marketing companies. "If you go to work for Hewlett-Packard, you don't walk in the door saying, 'Hey, I wonder if this is a scam?' But anybody who gets into multilevel marketing will have to deal with that question." … Like many critics, Paul Bortell of Plymouth, a former distributor who said he lost money for four years while in the business, said the system is designed to send most of the wealth to those at the top. "If I knew what DeVos knew, I couldn't sleep at night," Bortell said late last month. While many distributors have filed lawsuits against the company, they've had little success because of a clause included in their contract that requires disputes to be resolved in arbitration.
Click here to read the full article...http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006609240587