09.03.10

Ted Plays Detroit — Where he hates the middle class

Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 8:12 am by George Smith

The summer’s been hard on Ted Nugent.

Although you might not know it from the official press, they didn’t care for him in Kennewick, WA. Outside of House of Blues dates in the big coastal metropolises, he played only small clubs, casinos and rural fairgrounds. He was rebuked in Dubuque. And he managed to soil his reputation in his beloved sport of hunting.

On Labor Day, Nugent comes back to his former home — Detroit — to play a theatre gig where he recorded a 2008 live album.

Just in time, he’s also written a column for the WaTimes where he hates on unions:

Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.

Unionized public employees have better deals than the taxpayers who are funding them. Federal employees make twice as much as their private-sector peers. This is all beyond bizarro.

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Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.

Notice that in this piece he says “unionized public employees.” That would seem to preclude the auto industry.

Ted also kind of tries to separate federal government workers from state public sector employees, before slamming the latter, too. However, all are solidly middle class. And these are the same people who’s jobs the federal government has been endeavoring to save this summer by sending funding to the states in the face of total opposition from the GOP.

So Ted is actually hating on school teachers and policemen in Michigan, too. And if the FBI, or any government agency has offices in Michigan — which they do, all of them.

And he implies that compensation for unionized middle class labor is unfair without commenting on the pay for corporate American bosses. Or getting across the point that one of the reasons non-unionized middle class jobs pay more poorly than unionized has been the profoundly anti-labor climate that has been born in corporate America over the past few decades.

In the past, Ted has also been quite specific in his contempt for Detroit auto-workers and his wishes for their industry. He wanted it to die. It was wasteful and deserved to end.

Here’s Ted at the extreme right website Human Events in 2008, when the president was saving the US auto industry with a bail-out:

Taxpayers should not be held accountable to bailout the automobile industry or any other industry for that matter. There is constitutional authority for the decades of poor management decisions, forecasting and labor deals that have put GM, the U.S.’s largest automobile maker, perilously close to going belly up.

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While the [United Auto Workers] may believe GM, Ford and Chrysler are in business to provide automotive workers a salary and other costly benefits, the reality is that car companies are in business to make a profit. Period. Write that down.

The UAW’s costly benefit demands over the years coupled with weak automotive management who historically caved into the UAW’s demands put the automotive bolts, so to speak, to the shareholders and, to a certain degree, has put the Big Three on the path to possible extinction.

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Bailing out GM with billions of taxpayer dollars is the wrong approach. GM is not too big to fail. What GM may be is too unprofitable to stay in business.

The most singular paradox in Ted Nugent’s life may be that his steady decline in popularity mirrors the destruction of manufacturing jobs for the middle class in the US. His music, muscled and steely, was the sound of Detroit and his audience was the middle class. And now, in his older years, the man — shriveled from what he once was — rails against the very interests of the people who filled the stadiums he played in.

It’s tragic.

The final nail in the coffin in Michigan may have come when Ted was thrown off the bill of the Muskegon [Michigan] Summer Celebration a few years ago for being his usual mean old self. This was a big thing.

The show was an $80,000 gig and while Nugent was eventually paid in a breach of contract suit, the fallout from it hurt him. (DD has discussed that case here.)

Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.

Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.

Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.

Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.

The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.

And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.

Again, consider the pure Dickensian character — Ted Nugent — writing an anti-labor Labor Day column while preparing for his show in Detroit:

It’s a piece in which he superficially laments mass unemployment (and taking the standard GOP shot at those too discouraged to look for work) while simultaneously denigrating middle class unionized workers, blaming them for the economic catastrophe.

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