In a refreshing change, the Big Mitten wins


Two industrial icons, one of them partially crippled, shined on Michigan today. Bankrupt General Motors Corp. said it would locate its new small car plant at Orion Township, a move that will save a few thousand manufacturing jobs and keep an endangered stamping facility in Pontiac alive — even at the cost of steep local tax abatements.

And General Electric Co. says it will open a next-generation high-tech facility in Van Buren Township and create up to 1,200 new jobs, many of them paying $100,000 a year or more. The GE gambit holds greater symbolic importance, mainly because its proposed location lends credibility and heft to a planned “Aerotropolis” along the I-94 corridor between Willow Run and Detroit Metropolitan airports. Even North Carolina’s vaunted Research Triangle languished for years until a major corporate player — IBM? — became the kind of lead anchor tenant that wooed others.

The announcements are badly needed wins for beleaguered Michigan, its strained tax base and its embattled governor, Jennifer Granholm, holder of the worst economic record of any sitting governor in the nation. After months of nothing but bad news, GM and GE today delivered the industrial equivalent of manna from heaven — or evidence of the invisible hand of President Barack Obama’s auto task force and Treasury Department working a little magic.