Gurus of Flim-flammery

Spectator

People running for office tend to exaggerate their qualifications and ignore their shortcomings. We’ve come to accept at least some of that with each election cycle. But even by those unfortunately loose standards, Perry Johnson is a rather obvious outlier.

One of 12 Republican candidates trying to unseat Gretchen Whitmer as Michigan’s governor, Johnson was last to enter the contest and first to deluge the airwaves with a $1.5 million television barrage he financed himself. His ads, to be charitable, are hyperbolic nonsense.

Johnson claims he will lower gas prices, increase oil production, keep Line 5 open, reduce inflation, never, ever close public schools no matter what, and restore integrity to our elections. He blames Whitmer and President Biden for high gas prices. He even claimed he “saved” the auto industry.

For someone calling himself the “quality guru,” he’s a little short on research and the facts that would accompany the title. Let’s start with his energy claims.

The president actually has little impact on the price of gasoline and a governor almost none whatsoever. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the pump price of gasoline is determined by the cost of crude oil on the world market, the cost to refine that crude, the cost to distribute the refined product, and how much tax the federal and state governments assess. The federal gas tax is currently 18.4 cents per gallon, and Michigan levies 27.2 cents per gallon. Reducing those taxes also reduces the amount of money available for road and transit projects.

President Biden has already asked energy companies to increase their oil production to help offset recent price increases. There are some options; according to the Bureau of Land Management, there are currently 9,000 valid drilling permits and a whopping 26 million acres of federal land leased and available for production.

Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than just turning on a spigot. The energy sector has been hampered by the same labor and supply chain issues as every other industry. Under the best of circumstances, which do not now exist, it takes at least six to eight months from the start of drilling to actually producing. Even then, the oil companies are under pressure from stockholders who are realizing a dividend bonanza under the current conditions.

And depending on how it gets measured, the U.S. is either already the world’s leading oil producer or at least no worse than third. That ranking has absolutely nothing to do with who the governor of Michigan happens to be.

Johnson cannot promise he won’t ever close schools because there is no way he can anticipate what calamity might require it. It’s a pretty safe bet Whitmer and local school boards never imagined they were going to have to make choices about school closures due to a pandemic. Johnson could well be similarly blindsided.

One does grow tired of politicians and political candidates claiming they will restore the public’s confidence in elections when it is those very politicians who are trying so desperately to destroy that confidence. The integrity of our election system is just fine by any known metric despite the blizzard of lies being told by some.

The self-proclaimed quality guru would like us to believe he was in on the ground floor of developing quality statistical control programs which “saved” the auto industry. Actually, Walter Shewart is the real father of quality statistical control, which he first pioneered in the 1920s. Arthur Deming then turned it into an industry. Perry Johnson wasn’t around. (It was George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their respective Congresses that saved the auto industry with their billions of bailout dollars.)

What Johnson did do was create a business teaching other businesses how to pass certification audits and another business that conducted those audits. When one Johnson company began to audit and certify other Johnson companies, the conflict was too much for the U.S. Registrar Accreditation Board, which suspended his companies in the early 2000s until they stopped the conflicted business entanglements.

Before that, one of Johnson’s companies was the king of junk faxes. (Some will remember that before email and social media there were fax machines.) According to the March 14 article in Bridge Michigan, one Johnson company sent more than a million spam faxes in the 1990s in violation of federal law. He once even used prison labor for telemarketing.

As a recent bonus, Johnson endorsed Matthew DePerno for Michigan Attorney General. DePerno is chief among the 2020 election deniers and filed the first of the dozens of frivolous and failed election lawsuits. Questions have now been raised regarding what happened to nearly $400,000 DePerno collected for his Election Fraud Defense Fund, and he is among those being sued for defamation by voting machine companies.

Johnson and DePerno are a good match: the gurus of flim-flammery.

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