Omahgosh! Who woulda thunk it??? You are NOT going to believe this. It turns out (are you sitting down?) that the Snyder administration (I still cannot believe this is true), through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, gave wildly inflated job creation numbers to the state legislature last spring. INORITE???! The Legislature was told April 1 that companies that received grants […]

Pure Iowa Graphic by Anne C. Savage After it was revealed last week that the state of Michigan had awarded a $1.5 million contract to produce and distribute a Michigan tourism magazine to an Iowa-based company, Crain’s Detroit Business filed a Freedom of Information Act request and learned that at least two Michigan-based companies had come in with lower bids. […]

Scrub-a-dub-dub… Graphic by Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog Last January, I wrote first about the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) crowing about screwing workers with Right to Work. In fact, they corrupted our beloved “Pure Michigan” brand to do so. Shortly after that, I broke the story of how they scrubbed their Right to Work bragging from the state […]

Pure Michigan Iowa Anne Stanton of the Traverse City Record-Eagle has a great bit of journalism up today with a piece called “Michigan Mag Created in Iowa”. In it, she reports that the “Pure Michigan Travel Guide”, a magazine sent around the country to attract tourism into our beautiful state, is created by an editorial staff based, not in Michigan, […]

Well, that went well, didn’t it?

Last month, the Michigan Economic Development Corp (MEDC) used the “Pure Michigan” brand to brag about screwing unions by making Michigan a Right to Work state. They spent $144,000 to run a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to do so.

This week, MEDC vice president of government affairs, Jim McBryde, told the House Tourism Committee that they are putting further misuse of the successful “Pure Michigan” tourism brand to promote Right to Work on hold.

Click through for details.

Seriously, you didn’t think we’d notice?

As I noted in my piece earlier, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), the public-private group that runs the Pure Michigan campaign, has a page on their website called “Right to Work” that isn’t linked by any other pages on the site. (There’s a screenshot of it HERE in case it “goes away”.)

It got me wondering why, wasn’t it linked from anywhere else? Was it linked at one point but the links quietly disappeared in the hue and cry about their bragging about crushing unions in Michigan in their full-page Wall Street Journal ad???

Turns out, that’s exactly what happened. Details after the jump.

Pure Audacity

If you go to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) website right now, at the very top is the Pure Michigan Logo. On another page called “Right to Work”, this bold graphic dominates the page:

The “Right to Work” page is shown at the top as being part of the “Grow Your Business” section of the website yet the page itself isn’t linked from the “Grow Your Business” page or any other page that I could find on the site.

Note that it directly references our state’s new status as a “Right to Work” state, basically a message to prospective companies that Michigan workers are primed and ready to be exploited by corporations looking for a place to pay rock-bottom wages.

The MEDC is a private-public entity, designed to foster economic growth in Michigan and their tourism campaign, “Pure Michigan”, is known nationally as one of the most recognizable and successful efforts in the country. So, it was shocking to see our governor, Rick Snyder, take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with essentially the same message as the MEDC website.

Much more after the jump.