Praising Whirlpool with faint damns

Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press praises Whirlpool for building a new $85 million headquarters in the Benton Harbor area but only tells half the story. Yes, this is at least a temporary boost in the arm for the local economy as the office complex gets built.

But the HQ itself isn’t likely to employ any more people than were employed at the old one; heck, with technological improvements it might even employ fewer people. So this hardly makes up for the factory they closed in the same city earlier this year, destroying 216 jobs and sending them overseas — after getting $19 million in stimulus money to ostensibly help create jobs in this country.

That was just shortly after the company closed its factory in Evansville, Indiana, destroying another 1,100 jobs — and warning the workers there that they’d better not exercise their constitutional right to protest that decision because it might “hamper employees when they look for future jobs.”

Walsh praises Whirlpool for staying in Benton Harbor rather than moving their offices to some other city, but he only briefly — and incompletely — mentions one of the reasons why they were unlikely to go anywhere else:

In recent years, Whirlpool also has stepped up its investment in an array of civic projects, from Habitat for Humanity homes to a huge new lakefront golf and residential complex.

The last is a reference to the Harbor Shores gold resort project, and he sure makes it sound like a great deal. He doesn’t mention that the project swapped many acres of land that is highly contaminated as a result of Whirlpool’s manufacturing to the local government in exchange for pristine lakefront property that was given to the city on the condition that it remain a public park forever.

He doesn’t mention that the project removed 22 acres of public park land accessible to everyone to make way for a golf course that the local community will only have access to if they bus the tables or cut the grass — at wages far below what they were making at the factory the company closed down.

He doesn’t mention that the company swapped those contaminated parcels for the ostensible use as biking and hiking trails, then got Gov. Granholm to approve Brownfield tax credits for them — which effectively means that Michigan taxpayers will pay more than $12 million to clean them up instead of the company that contaminated them having to do so. Oh, and they’re getting more tax breaks from the state to build this new HQ, which means state taxpayers are going to actually foot the bill for that too.

He doesn’t mention that golf courses are a source of enormous environmental damage, using extremely large amounts of water, fertilizers and pesticides to maintain their appearance — and this one is located in formerly pristine public parkland that included natural sand dunes, and next to one of the world’s greatest bodies of fresh water.

So while it’s nice that Whirlpool is willing to allow Michigan’s taxpayers to build their spiffy new offices, it would be a whole lot nicer if they didn’t also expect us to clean up their past and future contamination while moving our jobs to Mexico.