Without Unions There Would Be No Labor Day. And that's the Least of It.

Every Labor Day I feel more and more like I'm at a labor union wake and all I can do is pay tribute to what once was a living, breathing, cherished part of so many of our lives.

Our lives. Workers built this country and labor unions went to bat to build protections for them.  As labor unions grew, so grew labor's strength. Wages rose to sustainable and beyond, benefits were true safety nets for workers and their families, the promise of healthy retirement packages kept worker loyalty high, and self-respect grew to levels where employees could demand and get concessions from their employers.

That, some would say, was their downfall.  They had no right to expect wages beyond what their employers thought they should pay. They had no right to expect working conditions beyond what their employers thought adequate. They had no right to expect benefits or retirement packages that would sustain them outside of work.  They had no right to make demands.

No, their downfall began when they believed it.

I'll be blasted any minute now by supporters of the notion that U.S workers were their own worst enemies, fighting against outsourcing and offshoring, against lower wages and benefits, against any action their employers might take in order to make a profit. They asked for too much and forced their employers' hands. Now look were they are.

Okay, let's look: (From an article by Richard Eskow, "How Much Will the War on Unions Cost You This Labor Day?)

If union enrollment had remained as high as it was in 1979, nonunion working men in the private sector would have earned an average of $2,704 more per year in 2013. The average non-unionized male worker without a college degree would have earned an additional $3,016, and those with only a high school diploma or less would have earned $3,172 more. (The differences were less striking for women because of workforce changes since the 1970s.)

The decline in union membership is costing nonunion workers a total of $133 billion per year, according to EPI.

Canada resembles the U.S. in many ways, but union membership there hasn’t fallen like it has here. Why not? In a word, union-friendlier policies – the kind our country should be embracing, but isn’t.

We need unions. EPI’s study confirms that they play a key role in reducing economic inequality, which is a growing crisis. The pay gap between CEOs and average workers has skyrocketed in recent decades – from about 20:1 in 1965 to somewhere between 204:1 and 331:1 today.

Everyone talks about the plight of the workers but nobody wants to talk about unions--about the role collective bargaining plays in worker rights and better wages; about the role unions once played in building a vibrant middle class.

So here's a test: Picture what this country would look like if unions had never existed. Imagine the lives of workers and their families if millions of their peers hadn't organized and fought, not just for pay equity, but for the dignity that comes from laboring as an equal with a stake in the outcome.  Ask yourself, were we--are we--better off with or without unions?

Labor Day began as a day to honor trade and labor organizations.  Huge parades designed to show the might of labor took place in cities across the country. I remember, as a small child, riding on my father's shoulders, watching a Labor Day parade in downtown Detroit, where row after row of union men and women marched in the hot sun, carrying flags and banners emblazoned with the names and numbers of their union locals.  It might even have been this one:

 Detroit was a town bursting with union pride. Whole families worked for the Big Three, most of them starting there fresh out of high school.  Many of them worked their full 30 Years And Out. Wages were good and benefits were better. Company loyalty was pervasive and public.  They wore their company names and union logos on their jackets, on their caps, and put union stickers on their cars--the cars they could watch being built from start to finish on the assembly line.

This year Bill Clinton will be the headliner at Monday's parade in Detroit. I hope he stops long enough to get an earful from the union folks working hard for Hillary in hopes that she'll work hard for them. I want to hear that word "union" attached to any mention of labor from now until November.

And next year, on Labor Day, I want to be rejoicing here and not commiserating.  I want attention to be paid to the workers still grinding away, building us up instead of tearing us down.  I want them to feel their worth, to know they're needed. I want to shove aside once and for all those who do everything they can to stand in their way.

Have a happy Labor Day weekend, but come Tuesday let's get back to work.  All together now, let's give labor a chance.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Crooks and Liars)

Daylight in the Garden of Good and Kowalski

Hamtramck is a tiny city completely surrounded by big Detroit.  It has almost nothing in common with Motown except that they're both temporarily under the thumb of appointed, not elected, emergency managers. 

As with Detroit, Hamtramck's EM has far-reaching and unassailable dictatorial powers.  Hamtramck, like Detroit, is broke, and, according to the emergency managers in both towns, the only way to save them is to sell off all valuable assets--even those that make these towns what they are.

In Detroit, that could be (and very well might be) the venerable, world class Art Institute, but tiny Hamtramck has no such booty.  What they do have is a lovely community garden, thanks to a five-year adopt-a-lot agreement put in place by the mayor in 2011, giving the community necessary protection, along with an incentive to keep those gardens--now called Hamtown Farms--going.

Photo credit:  Hamtown Farms

  But strange as it may seem to those of us who see more value in the community garden part than in the worth of vacant lots, Cathy Square, Hamtramck's EM and resident carpetbagger (in place since way back in June), decided on her own that since the Kowalski Sausage Company next door wanted the garden lots for themselves, (and since a lawsuit restricting the sale of city-owned lots had ended) she should just go ahead and sell them.

Since Hamtown Farms had already invested over $40,000 into their gardens, based on lot prices in the area they thought an offer of $2500 for five lots would be fair.  Kowalski countered with $3000, a mere $500 more. Hamtown Farms saw the writing on the wall and thought that was the end.

When citizens got wind of the potential sale and caused a bit of a stink, mainly because those five city lots sat empty for over 30 years before they were rescued and turned into gardens, Ms. Square was miffed.  Okay, then, she said.  Not worth the hassle. I've made the decision to put them up for auction, instead.  So before anybody could ask, Isn't that, like, still selling them? the bids were opened.

After a protracted bidding war, Hamtown Farms ended up with the winning bids on three of the five lots, but at almost 10 times their original offer.   Kowalski paid $11,000 for the lot with the planted trees, a loss that saddens those who had been nurturing those trees.

But thanks to donors and an Indiegogo fund drive, it looks like Hamtown Farms will get to keep their gardens.

No thanks to Kowalski Sausage.  Whatever happened to public relations, particularly when you're a Polish sausage maker in what was once a traditionally Polish city? The Emergency Manager decreed that all vacant lots in Hamtramck must be sold, so surely there were others nearby that would have suited them just as well.

Considering how much more those lots ended up selling for (far more per lot than any other in the city), you have to wonder what happened there?  Kowalski could have bought two or three lots for what they paid for that single treed lot in the Gardens.  Why were they so stuck on that one?  And what are they going to do with it?
Even more puzzling, why were those particular lots targeted by the EM, when initially they weren't worth that much money and have become such a happy part of the community?  There's no figuring out those bottom-liners.  That's because they're all about the bottom line.  The wants and needs of the people will always take a back seat until they've finished them.  And when they're finished with them they'll be gone.

I live for the day when the lawsuits against Emergency Managers in Michigan are settled and won.  Last November, as everyone but Gov. Snyder seems to remember, the people of Michigan voted down the Governor's plan for Emergency Managers, but his administration sidestepped the will of the people and installed them, anyway.

Hamtramck's EM won't have the kind of clout that Detroit's EM, Kevyn Orr has, but going after a successful community garden where empty lots once stood and making them pay exorbitant rates in order to keep it, tells me all I need to know about where Cathy Square is coming from--and where she's headed.

If I lived in Hamtramck, I wouldn't take my eyes off of her for even a second.


(Big H/T to Eclectablog for bringing this story to light.  For a  PBS video clip about Hamtown Farms, go here.  If you would like to donate to Hamtown Farms, go here.)

RIP Elmore Leonard

Sadly, Elmore Leonard, has died.  He was Detroit's foremost novelist and cheerleader.  I wrote about him at Constant Commoner today in a piece called "I called Elmore Leonard 'Dutch' Once".

You can find it here.

George Will ruminating on Detroit: About like Howdy Doody ruminating on the Moon

So George Will, highly renowned municipal analyst and wicked good judge of character, has once again set his sights on Detroit. Somehow--don't ask me how--I knew this would happen.  I knew it would happen because the decline of Detroit, our allegedly foremost black and poor city, is in the spotlight, and it's beyond George Will's ability to say no to such delicious news .

Behold!  An entire city has fallen to such lows there is nothing left but to declare them bankrupt--financially, morally, culturally, and--sigh--intellectually.  The city is beyond hope, reduced now to gasping its last breath.

As the pack of jackals awaiting nearby begins to close in; begins to circle, no surprise that one George F. Will, tightass extraordinaire, is right up front.  Will is not one to not have an opinion, even when he knows next to nothing about the subject--especially if the subject is one he believes is beneath him.

Will has a snooty gene that tends to surface whenever les miserables are shown to be more miserable than usual.  It is his duty to explain to the miserables just how culpable they are in their own undoing.  Because if he didn't explain it to them, they might not know to feel both miserable and guilty.  Guilt is the twist of the knife.  There is no redemption without the twist of the knife.   

You've been bad, Detroit.  And worse, you've been ordinary. You must repent.  You must take your licks.

In December, 2012, he wrote:

If you seek a monument to Michigan's unions, look, if you can without wincing, at Detroit, where the amount of vacant land is approaching the size of Paris. And where the United Auto Workers, which once had more than 1 million members and now has about 380,000, won contracts that crippled the local industry — and prompted the growth of the non-unionized auto industry that is thriving elsewhere. Detroit's rapacious and oblivious government employees unions are parasitic off a near-corpse of a city that has lost 25 percent of its population just since 2000. The Wall Street Journal reports that because some government workers with defined-benefit pensions can retire in their 40s, "many retirees living into their 80s are drawing benefits for nearly twice as long as they work." 

Union contracts didn't cripple Detroit's auto industry, corporate greed did.  They were bad at sharing, even though without the workers in Detroit that industry would never have grown as it did.  Once they figured out that they could outsource or robotize much of the manufacturing, they were off to the races.  Why give living wages when you can get by on giving slave wages somewhere else?

Will's notion that the city's union employees were "rapacious and oblivious" to the dying Detroit and it was the out-of-control pension funds that dealt the final deathblow is just farcical.

This, according to the Free Press last week:

The battle over the health of the City of Detroit pension funds flared again Friday when the Bond Buyer, a Wall Street publication, reported on a new analysis showing that the pension funds’ optimistic assessments “fall mostly within accepted industry standards.”
Kevyn Orr, the city’s emergency manager, has estimated the underfunding of the city’s two pension funds at $3.5 billion. The pension fund managers disagree, saying the funds are more than 90% funded, meaning that there are adequate resources to pay almost all future liabilities.

H/T for the above to Chris Savage over at Eclectablog, who gives further voice to what a lot of us have been thinking:

Look, I get it that Detroit is in a major crisis. I do. I get that. But there isn’t any reason for Kevyn Orr to jump on the ruin porn train to make things look worse than they are unless he’s afraid that Detroit will be found not to actually be insolvent, which puts his plan to take the city through bankruptcy in peril. There’s also the fact that wealthy, opportunistic vultures waiting in the wings to swoop in and exploit Detroit’s situation for their own financial gain. That means snapping up city assets at bargain basement prices and getting lucrative contracts when anything not nailed down gets privatized to for-profits corporations.

Nobody questions the fact that Detroit has been in a steady decline for decades.  Corruption was rampant there for longer than any of us want to remember.  Dependence on one significant but fleeting industry for almost a century was pure folly.  There are ghettos and drug wars and crime statistics that place Detroit too often at the top of the list.  But the workers in Detroit are tired of taking the blame.  The city may never rise to its former glory, but it can and will survive only if it can feel worthy again.  The George Wills don't help:

"Detroit...has suffered not just economic setbacks but also a cultural collapse that precludes a rapid recovery. Despite some people’s facile talk about “rebooting” Detroit, as though it is a balky gadget, this is a place where dangerous packs of feral dogs roam. No city can succeed without a large middle class, and in spite of cheery talk about a downtown sprinkling of “hipsters and artisans,” a significant minority of Detroit’s residents are functionally illiterate and only 12 percent have college degrees (in Seattle, 56 percent do). Families are the primary transmitters of social capital, and 79 percent of children here are born to unmarried women. What middle-class family would send children into a school system where 3 percent of fourth-graders meet national math standards?"

Will precedes his indictment of an entire city with this cheery shout-out to Rick Snyder, Michigan's Koch-fueled dictator-in-residence (Emphasis mine):

Snyder is neither surprised nor dismayed by the Obama administration’s prompt refusal to consider bailing out the city: “I had made it clear I wasn’t going to ask them” for a bailout. One example of Washington’s previous costly caring is Detroit’s People Mover, the ghost train that circulates mostly empty. Snyder dismisses this slab of someone else’s pork as “part of the 60 years of failure.” He has largely forsworn attracting businesses to the city by offering tax credits, which he calls “the heroin drip of government.” He speaks not of “fixing” but of “reinventing” Detroit, by which he means a new “culture of how to behave and act.”

 Well, isn't that the all-time limit?  Snyder, the nerdy number-cruncher-cum-plantation-boss, now sets his sights on culture and manners.  (Anything else, massa?)  And George Will apparently thinks that's cool. 

So the next time George wants to talk about Detroit I've got a soapbox I'll set up for him. Right here in Grand Circus Park, where the hipsters and artisans and other clueless undesirables can come and hear what he has to say about their city.  (Fear not, George, it's nowhere near where feral dogs might lurk.)

Grand Circus Park, Detroit

Be sure and wear your bow tie, George, and bring your wife.  She might want to talk about her activities in both Rick Perry's and Michele Bachmann's campaigns.  That'll be a real ice-breaker.  A few laughs can't hurt.

But remember where you are and nix the happy talk about Snyder.  I mean, really.  Listen to me.  I know what I'm talking about.

(Featured today on Mike's Blog Roundup at Crooks and Liars.  Welcome, new visitors!   Cross-posted, as always, at dagblog)

Hey, Detroit. It's Only Art

Safe to say that ever since the news broke that the entire city of Detroit was filing for bankruptcy hundreds of thousands of us Detroiters and ex-Detroiters and Michiganders everywhere have been biting our nails, gnashing our teeth, pounding the walls, spending partially-sleepless nights worrying about the fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA).

Detroit Institute of Arts

The DIA, our beautiful jewel of an art museum, is wholly-owned by the city.  The city of Detroit.  Yes, they own it.  They used to say the people owned it, but apparently, as with "By, For, and Of the People", it's all in the interpretation. 

So what's the first thing we hear after that awful news about going bankrupt?  The VERY first thing?  (Even before we heard that the state was going to put up $285 million to build a new stadium for the Red Wings.) We hear that if things don't go right all or part of the DIA's extensive, expensive, exquisite art collection could be up for grabs.

This is how Bill Nowling, spokesman for Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr so delicately put it:

"We went to the DIA two months ago and told them that we thought, should the city be forced by its creditors into Chapter 9 bankruptcy, that the assets of the city could be vulnerable."

The folks who manage the DIA as a public, non-profit institution successfully parsed that particular end-phrase and have already contacted lawyers. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette says the works can't be sold because they're held in a public trust.  Others aren't so sure.  The creditors could put up a real stink if they find out Detroit is swimming in assets over at the Purty Pitcher place.  It's a mess.

Then we find out that appraisers from Christie's Auction House invited themselves in and have already been there measuring the nudes and stirring up the dust.  I mean, could you be any more insensitive?

Well, yes, it turns out you can.  Ever heard of Peter Schjeldahl? He's the art critic for the New Yorker.  He lives in New York City.  He's never been to the DIA.  Still, he felt compelled to blog all over the place that it's no skin off his nose if the DIA has to sell off some of our art.

See if you can read the following and give a rodent's patooty about this guy's opinion of what's best for the DIA.  (Lots of hoity-toity words like "ineluctable" and "deaccessions" and "demur" and "abjure".  Just warning you.  And "solicitude".  Right at the end. "Solicitude".)

Art works have migrated throughout history. Unless destroyed, they are always somewhere. It’s best when they are on public display, but if they have special value their sojourns in private hands are likely temporary. At any rate, they are hardly altered by inhabiting one building rather than another. The relationship of art to the institutions that house and display it is a marriage of convenience, with self-interest on both sides, and not an ineluctable romance. I demur from the hysterical piety, among many of my fellow art folk, that regularly greets news of museum deaccessions—though I do wish museums would have the guts to abjure that weasel word for selling things off. (Paging George Orwell.) A museum may thereby maim itself; but the art takes no notice. Protest as we should a local institution’s short-sighted or venal behavior, we must admit at least a sliver of light between such issues and art’s immemorial claims on our solicitude.

In Schjeldahl's stuffy, sniffy piece he pokes a little fun at New Republic writer Nora Caplan-Bricker, who wrote a counterpoint called, "In Defense of Crumbling Museums: Why Detroit Should Keep Its Art".  (Happily, Caplan-Bricker manages to do it without using a single one of those words in quotes above.  And with paragraphs.)

So I'm over there at the New Republic hoping to wallow a while in some commiserating comfort when Nora whaps me silly in the second paragraph with a quote from a writer over at Bloomberg who, if it's possible, is an even bigger smarty-pants than that guy Schjeldahl.

Virginia Postrel's piece is called, "Detroit's Van Gogh Would Be Better Off in L.A".  Yes.  I am serious.  I read it three times.  The title, if you can believe it, is the least cutting of all.  (You might want to sit down for this one. Unless you're already thinking by the title you'll be agreeing with Ginny.  In that case, just stand there, you idiot.)

So Virginia, (yes, a Los Angeles resident) says:

If I lived in Detroit, I’d want to keep these artworks, too. And if I were a museum employee, I’d be particularly demoralized. The DIA has in recent years shown itself a responsible financial steward, and last August won voter approval in three surrounding counties for its first dedicated property-tax funding.

Well, isn't that special?  But wait. . .

Parochial interests aside, however, great artworks shouldn’t be held hostage by a relatively unpopular museum in a declining region. The cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they’ve ever been in Detroit. Art lovers should stop equating the public good with the status quo.

And then she says:

In fiscal 2012, which ended June 30, the Detroit museum attracted just fewer than 489,000 visits -- barely 1,000 more than it drew in 1928. With admission now free to residents of the tri-county area, the numbers are up this year, to about 526,000 through April. (These numbers count visits, not individuals; if you come five times, it counts as five visits.) By contrast, last year the Getty Center attracted 1.2 million visitors to a collection whose most impressive asset is the building in which it is housed. (The attendance figure doesn’t include visitors to the separate Getty Villa, which houses Greek and Roman art.)

The museum’s director, Timothy Potts, is charged with adding major works. Last month, the Getty announced the purchase of “Rembrandt Laughing,” a self-portrait of the young painter discovered in 2007, and a Canaletto view of the Grand Canal in Venice. But a young museum can only buy what’s for sale. 

And in conclusion Virginia earnestly suggests that:

Letting the Getty add the Canaletto view of the Piazza San Marco now in Detroit wouldn’t constitute a rape or a bonfire of the vanities. Hanging Van Gogh’s self-portrait [also in Detroit] alongside his “Irises” at the Getty or Bellini’s Madonna [also in Detroit] near his “Christ Blessing” at the Kimbell would not betray the public trust. It would enhance it.

Because they're L.A (or New York)?  Because they have the Getty (or the MOMA)?  Because at our art museum every person, rich or poor, big or little, can wander up and down and through our grand halls, our wondrous rooms, studying, sighing, swooning, breathing it all in, feeling like a million bucks, like there isn't anybody luckier at this very moment,  for free?

Deliver us, please, from unctuous snobs and make them stay where they are.  We're Detroit and they're not.  And we like it that way.

Rivera Court, DIA (Not the murals destroyed at Rockefeller Center, NYC, after Diego Rivera dared to include a figure of Lenin.  We kept ours, it should be noted.)

Addendum:  Mr. Schjeldahl at the New Yorker has had a change of heart.  Click here.


(Cross-posted, as always, at dagblog)

Mr. Auctioneer: Saving Our Homes One by One

 
Yesterday there was a rally in front of the 22nd District Court in Inkster, Michigan, where foreclosure proceedings were being held.  The protesters were there to help save the home of Jerome Jackson, a paraplegic who moved into his wheelchair-accessible home in 2004 with the assistance of Community Living Services, a county-funded program that provided help with his mortgage payments.  When CLS dropped Jackson's funding in 2009, he fell behind on his payments and Fannie Mae eventually bought his mortgage at a foreclosure auction.  He was a man without a home, but he stayed put, hoping they could work it out and the house might someday be his again.

No amount of pleading could sway the steadfast bottom-liners from moving toward the day when Jerome Jackson would finally be evicted.  No addition funding came his way, even though he is handicapped and certainly qualifies.  Payment modification appears to have been out of the question.  The house now belongs to an entity given personhood by our Supreme Court without also having given it a heart.

A story told many times before, most often with a less-than-happy ending, but Jerome Jackson isn't fighting his battle against the Big Guys alone.  A loose coalition made up of UAW Local 600 and members of three local groups--Occupy Detroit, Moratorium Now, and People Before Banks--have taken up the cause and are responsible for organizing this rally (and others, as needed):

The banks were bailed out for their reckless profiteering
and fraudulent practices because they were “too big to fail.”
Jerome Jackson is “too human to discard.”

 Whatever the outcome, let it be said that the people tried.

There was a time when we might have read this story and moved on, saddened by the prospect but generally acknowledging that--poor man--what's done is done.  We've been there, we've done that, over and over again.  What we're left with are numbers of foreclosures and evictions across the country so unbelievable it feels like something out of a depression-era novel.  What we're left with is a whole lot of suffering, the causes of which smack suspiciously of callous profiteering, alternately smacking of outright criminal cruelty.

Much of my own state, Michigan, is struggling with heavy foreclosure rates, but in Detroit the statistics are especially grim. Roger Bybee put it into perspective in his "In These Times" piece yesterday:

Abysmal poverty afflicts the city; 40,000 households have suffered water shutoffs. The specter of thousands of new home foreclosure stalks the city, threatening to push more Detroiters out of their homes on top of the 67,000 bank foreclosures—more than 20 percent of all household mortgages—that hit the city between 2005 and 2009 alone. The city already has an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 vacant homes. With the ongoing wave of foreclosures, home values have been plunging. Foreclosed homes sell for $38,000 in Wayne County and less than $11,000 in Detroit, according to RealtyTrac.

Bybee writes of a particular foreclosure effort that didn't follow the norm, thanks to the efforts of caring individuals joining together as a formidable coalition:

Labor educator Steve Babson, a leader of People Before Banks and author of Working Detroit, recounted a recent action that was “a scene straight out of Charles Dickens." An elderly African-American couple, with husband William legally blind, missed some mortgage payments to the New York Bank of Mellon Trust. In a sheriff’s sale, the bank bought the home for $12,000, meaning that the Garretts would have to move from their home of 22 years in the dead of winter.
At one point, Bertha Garrett thought that she had persuaded the bank to sell the home to the Garretts for the $12,000 that the couple had managed to scrape together. But then the bank backed out of the deal, insisting on a sale price of $24,000, far out of reach for the couple.

Usually, what happens next step in the foreclosure process is the arrival of a truck hauling a dumpster, with a crew ready to throw out a family’s belongings. But UAW 600 and its allies confronted the would-be eviction team with a tactic appropriate to the Motor City: cars and lots of them. The anti-foreclosure forces surrounded the Garretts’ home with dozens of cars, and the bank’s evictors were shut out. When the eviction squad called in the police, officers came to the scene but dismissed it as a “civil matter” and drove off. That left the anti-foreclosure forces still in command of the situation, and the evictors left the scene.
Meanwhile, some 40 protesters—about half from Local 600—picketed outside the Mellon bank to publicize its treatment of the Garretts. With the eviction foiled and the prospect of bad publicity growing, the Mellon bank relented and sold the Garretts’ home back to them for $12,000.

(NOTE:  No, I don't know how the Garretts came up with the needed $12,000.  I've anticipated that question from the folks who think all economic victims got that way on purpose, so here's my answer:  I'll bet my life that they weren't hiding it under their mattress, waiting to pull it out just in the nick of time, guaranteeing a rip-roaring miracle of a finish to what seemed in the early scenes like a real tragedy.  The point, you ninnies, is that the bank reneged on an agreement and asked for double the amount, just because they could.)

Attempts to stop foreclosure actions are taking place all over the country.  One particularly innovative way is to sing it.  This video is from a courtroom in New York, but the "Mr. Auctioneer" song is traveling fast and is now being sung in rallies and in foreclosure courts all across the nation.  (Rachel Maddow's take here.)

 Mr. Auctioneer

All the people here 

Are asking you to stop all the sales right now

We’re going to survive, but we don’t know how

Foreclosure protest singers being led out of a NY courtroom

 
Is this just the start of something big?  Or is it already big? 

It appears to be big.  People are gathering in organized protests in all corners of the country and the word "occupy" is taking on a whole new meaning.  It's not just about Wall Street anymore.  It's moved to our cities, our towns, our neighborhoods.  It's about where we live and how we live and who gets to decide.

Everywhere there are coalitions forming to combat the coalitions intent on keeping the Honkin' Big Bonanza going, but to see what's happening locally you need look no further than the nearest union hall.  Check out their websites.  You'll find deep and abiding involvement in helping members of their communities entrapped in an economy not of their doing and not of their choice.  (It's because they're unions, O dubious ones.  That's what unions do.)

Have you noticed that it's getting harder and harder to shame people whose only motivation is making tons, and I mean literally tons, of money?  They've played the blame-the-victim game for so long they've fine-tuned to perfection the pretense that keeping the über-wealthy happy means riches for us all.  Never mind that there hasn't been a single economic indicator in the history of our republic that proves their point. Never mind that we've been keeping the über-wealthy happy at our expense for decades now and all that has happened to make lives better is that the über-wealthy have become ecstatic to the point of permanent giddy.

People are suffering through no fault of their own.  Others are not only profiting from their suffering, they're doing everything they can to keep it that way.  Now we've taken it upon ourselves to do something about it. 

Real people making real change.  And for the good.  It's just crazy enough to work.

Feeling Guilty about Giving Thanks. It's a Liberal Thing

This year we've decided to stay home for Thanksgiving.  Our nearest family is 350 miles away but every year but one (and now this one) we've managed to be together for this holiday.  We'll be seeing them all in three weeks or so for the Christmas holidays, but I'm missing them acutely today. 

My guy and I have always done the planning and the cooking so I've never had much time to think about the Giving Thanks part, even though it's always in the background as we putter happily around the kitchen, never deviating from the traditional meal they've come to expect -- nay, demand:  Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, mashed turnips, sweet potatoes, gravy, corn, cranberries, tossed salad, Ambrosia salad, rolls, Apple pie and Pumpkin pie. (Food that could kill if taken in large doses over too long a period.  I get it.  Nobody cares.)

So this morning, since there was no real call to duty, I woke up thinking not about what I had to do first, but about Detroit, Father Cunningham, Eleanor Josaitis, and Focus:HOPE.  In the announcement of her death in August, Eleanor was what the NYT called a "housewife-turned-activist".  (I know.  Me too)  Father Cunningham ("guardian of the poor" in his NYT obit.) was her parish priest and good friend.  Together they created a non-profit organization to help the poor and disenfranchised and it has been a beacon of light shining in the gloom of Detroit for 43 years.

Eleanor Josaitis and Focus: HOPE students

 From the Times obituary:

After racial hostility exploded into riots across Detroit in 1967, [Josaitis] uprooted her husband and five children from Taylor, Mich., moved to the city and set out to help heal it.
“You have to have the guts to try something, because you won’t change a damn thing by sitting in front of the TV with the clicker in your hand,” Mrs. Josaitis said in a 2004 profile in the magazine Fast Company.

In 1968, she joined with her priest, the Rev. William T. Cunningham, to establish Focus: Hope. The organization called them “an unlikely pair,” describing Father Cunningham as an “outspoken visionary” and Mrs. Josaitis as “the practical operations manager.”

Focus: Hope says it now provides food to 43,000 people a month and operates job training programs that have prepared 11,000 mostly minority and poor residents of metropolitan Detroit for careers in engineering, machinist trades and other fields. With its own 40-acre office campus, it employs 285 people.

 Well, that was as near ago as this summer.  This is now:  Yesterday the headline in the Free Press read, "Funding Cuts hit Focus: HOPE.  Layoffs ahead, training programs suspended."  The reason?  Nearly 6 million needed dollars in jobs program funding are being held up while members of Congress fight over who gets what, if anything.  From the Free Press:

The work force development programs affected are the Information Technologies Center, Machinist Training Institute, Fast Track math and reading program and the Center for Advance Technologies, which is a college program.

As many as 1,200 students a year have enrolled in the programs. Since 1981, when Focus: HOPE began its job training programs, 11,000 students have completed programs, according to agency officials.

Jones said that Focus: HOPE had expected to receive $5.86 million in funds under the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 for its job training programs on Oct. 1 -- the beginning of the fiscal year. It's about one-sixth of Focus: HOPE's estimated $35-million budget.
Jones said the agency's programs are a casualty of the debate over federal spending in Washington.

Every day we're hearing about the Republican's insistence that in this terrible economy the obvious solution is to cut all those bloated social programs.  They're digging their heels in, refusing to move on anything until the poorest of the poor, or even the richest of the poor, are reduced to a choice of either begging in the streets or taking the slave-wage jobs now so popular overseas.   It's a cold, miserable world we've allowed to let happen and the people affected so cruelly by the actions of our chosen leaders deserve a whole lot better.

That's where my Thanksgiving guilt comes in. We cook that huge meal for our family, and they're grateful and we enjoy doing it, but always in the back of my mind I'm thinking of the people who have no family, who will have no dinner, who don't even know what tomorrow will bring.  I've never been able to sit down to a fully-laden table without thinking those thoughts.  But they pass, don't they, and tomorrow is another day.  

I've done that whole round-the-table "what are you thankful for this year?" thing and -- I'll put this mildly:  I don't get off on it.   "I'm thankful for my dear family and for my good health and all these good eats, and if the Lions win I'll really be thankful...".

And as this is going on, I'm thinking "Oliver Twist".   

I give thanks to people like Eleanor Josiatis, housewife-turned-activist, who saw a need and did something about it.  She took a step and another step and then went on to devote her whole life working toward bettering the lives of people who needed someone like her to come along and move them toward hope.

To religious activists like the late Father Cunningham and to Rev. Ed Rowe, who I guarantee is in a soup kitchen right now getting ready to feed people a dinner with a few more fixings than yesterday's, offering the kind of reliable sustenance that comes more than just twice a year.

To liberals everywhere who see the need to keep fighting for the kind of justice that will move men, women and children out of poverty and into a life that not only promises hope but delivers it.

Thank you, my beloved heroes. To you I give thanks.     

Poor Old Detroit: Who is going to save it from itself?

Detroit is my unofficial hometown.  I spent more years in and around Detroit than anywhere else in the country. I loved growing up there, so it would be hard not to have feelings for the city now, even after all of the scandals, the neglect, the excesses, the tearing-down of beautiful landmarks, and the destruction of entire formerly lovely neighborhoods for no earthly good reason other than that nobody cared.

Even though I don't live there any longer, and haven't for years, I keep Detroit in my sights.  It's like an old friend gone weary and self-destructive.  All the hand-wringing in the world isn't going to save it from itself, but a friend is a friend forever, and often we delude ourselves by living on memories alone.  We just can't let go.

My adopted city has long been at the mercy of elected officials gone greedy and potentatish.  Once in office, the lot of them come to see the city coffers -- taxpayer money -- as their own personal gold-stores ripe for the taking.

Detroit Public Schools, the sole resource for educating the city's poor youth, has a dismal history of allowing the school board to spend much needed funds on fancy office furniture and through-the-roof expense accounts for exotic trips and chauffeur-driven limos.  (Dan Rather ran a two-hour special on the DPS in May.  They called it  "A National Disgrace".  That's putting it mildly.)

I was a student in Detroit Public Schools in the 1940s.  Our buildings were beautiful, and so were the grounds.  We had gorgeous conservatories and libraries filled with stacks of leather-bound books, made cozy and welcoming with huge stone fireplaces, polished oak walls and sparkling leaded-glass windows.  I can still conjure up feeling pretty special while wandering around inside one of those schools.

I don't know what happened -- the blame is often put on White Flight, on racism, on the movement of factories outside the city -- but whatever it was, all that was golden and promising in Detroit is no more.

I blame some of it on the dissection of the neighborhoods by ill-placed freeways, and on the serious lack of any kind of useful public transportation.  There simply is no way to use public buses to get around the city.  Huge sections are left to fend for themselves if cars are not available.

I blame some of it on the wholesale destruction of historic buildings and neighborhoods where, along with the demolition of thousands of tons of brick and mortar, a sense of belonging, of history, of continuity, was crushed beyond repair.

But I blame most of it on a lack of caring.  Jobs have left the city, leaving poverty behind.  Any attempt at gentrifying the city is met with suspicion and a lack of support from city services, including police and fire departments.  It's big news if a major chain looks to build a store in Detroit proper.  The bigger news is how many choose not to build in Detroit. 

I know for a fact that there are people in Detroit who hate what has happened to their city and are working to make it better. (Eleanor Josaitis was one of them.  She passed last week and will be forever missed.)  Former basketball star Dave Bing is the current mayor, having taken over after Kwame Kilpatrick's reign as head poobah of one of the most corrupt regimes in Detroit's history.  I want to believe Bing when he says he's working hard to make life better in Detroit.  I want to believe him when he says he's investigating this latest mess concerning the outright theft of monies meant to go to the poorest of the poor. (See below)  I want to take him at his word, but when I see that he has warned his staff not to talk to the media about this, I would be a fool not to wonder why.

In a revelation that's almost hard to comprehend in a city as poor as Detroit, it's the city's Human Services Department that is currently under fire for personal and possibly illegal spending sprees.  The Human Services Department is the place where the poor are supposed to be able to get the help they need. Funding comes in the form of Federal Community Services anti-poverty Block Grants, which are meant to be used for employment, education, income management, housing, nutrition, emergency services and health, according to federal guidelines.

Instead, they've been used to buy top-of-the-line washers and dryers, refrigerators and freezers, a laptop computer, a Wii Fit game, and assorted gift cards, none of which ever benefited the poor. This is the same department that was under fire earlier this year for spending $210,000 of the block grant money to buy expensive office furniture.

Here is the Detroit Free Press lede:

Three employees of the Detroit Human Services Department, including the director, have been fired after a Free Press investigation revealed mismanagement and misspending.

Mayor Dave Bing announced the firings after the city investigated the newspaper's report that $210,000 in federal funds intended for poor people were spent instead on office furniture.
Bing said the investigation found nothing "fraudulent or criminal in nature" and then revealed that "most of the furniture purchases have been accounted for, however, two televisions and 10 computers have been determined missing."

Bing said the investigation found "a lack of oversight and poor inventory management."

Good Lord.  That's how Mayor Bing sees it.  It'll be interesting to see how the Feds see it.  An investigation follows some time this week.

Meanwhile, if that's not depressing enough, there's this story by former Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper in her "Detroit Diary".  She writes that, in modern Detroit, people are going to jail for stealing things like diapers, formula, and vitamins, and not being able to pay fines for taking a fish out of season.

"Long thought to be a relic of the 19th Century, debtors’ prisons are still alive and well in Michigan,” my good friend, Kary Moss, ACLU of Michigan’s executive director, said in a press release. “Jailing our clients because they are poor is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. Our justice system should be a place where freedom has no price and equality prevails regardless of a defendant’s economic status.”

But a 2010 multi-state study by the ACLU entitled, "In for a Penny," showed that Michigan is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to jailing people who are too poor to pay fines.

"Michigan, a state hit harder than most by the recession, is trying to find operating funds in the most unlikely of places: the pockets of poor people who have been convicted of crimes," concluded the report. "Though the Michigan Constitution forbids debtors’ prisons and state laws explicitly prohibit the jailing of individuals who cannot pay court fines and fees because they are too poor, judges routinely threaten to jail and frequently do jail poor people who cannot pay."

So stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a poor folks fund is simply "a lack of oversight and poor inventory management" but stealing a few dollars' worth of necessary food and goods, or not being able to pay a fine, is reason enough for a jail sentence?

Detroit in the 21st century. "Les Miserables" all over again, as Cooper says.  What makes it even more disheartening is that these stories and others like them are all the ammunition Gov. Snyder and his Koch-addicted bunch need to get away with appointing "emergency financial managers" to take over school districts and municipalities and give them to private interests to do with them as they will.  The question, as always, is will Detroit survive?  The answer, as always, eludes us.  It's up to the people now.  We'll see if they think Detroit is still worth it.

 One evening, little Gavroche had had no dinner; he remembered that he had had no dinner the day before either; this was becoming tiresome.  Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

Rosa Parks: No Way to Treat a Lady

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. 

Rosa Parks,  My Story.

 In December, 1955, after a long day at work as a seamstress at a Montgomery, Alabama department store, Rosa Parks got on her bus and plunked down in a first-row seat of the section clearly defined as Blacks Only.  "The back of the bus".  The unwritten, unofficial public transportation rule in Montgomery said no white person should be standing in the aisle if a black person has a seat to give up to them.  Four white men got on the bus but the white section was full.  The four blacks in the first row of the black section were told to get up and give up their seats.  Three of the four moved.  Parks sat and waited. She was arrested and fingerprinted on the day which would mark the end of what might have been for her a quiet, uneventful life.  It was the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott, an effort that would last just over a year before the U. S Supreme Court struck down the laws on transportation segregation.

She wasn't the first one to have refused to give up a seat on a Montgomery bus (the civil rights movement was already well under way) but black leaders, including a young, untested Martin Luther King, wanted an issue in Montgomery and Rosa Parks was perfect in the role of innocent provocateur.  She was far from being apolitical, however.  At the time of her arrest, she was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP and was working with other groups to engage in passive resistance to the Jim Crow laws of her state.

Her actions brought unwelcome public attention to Montgomery in the form of that year-long bus boycott. The days of segregated buses, schools, lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains were numbered, though it would take a few more ugly years before certain thick-headed whites got the message.

It was one of those iconic events that registers and resonates until both the event and the person triggering it become larger than life.  She became Rosa Parks, the embodiment of passive civil disobedience, and continued as an activist throughout her life, until a series of illnesses brought her work to a halt.

Before she died at age 92, she co-founded The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit, the city where she was living when she died, "to motivate and direct youth not targeted by other programs to achieve their highest potential".  Her will specifically left the bulk of her estate to the institute -- some $372,000 plus what had once been described as over 10 million dollars worth of memorabilia.  Last week the Detroit Free Press front page headline read:  "Rosa Parks' estate was drained. Cash Gone, memorabilia is in limbo."

 Parks died in October, 2005. By November her relatives were petitioning the court to overturn the will that left them with just dregs and neglected to give them control over the estate.  By the time it was over,  lawyers' fees had eaten up most of the cash, and the Institute she so loved was no longer in control of the funds or the memorabilia.

This is one complicated story, but this is what David Ashenfelter at the Freep says, in part, is at the heart of it:

In exchange for confirming the validity of Parks' will and trust, [Steven Cohen, lawyer for co-founder Elaine Steele and the institute] said, the institute agreed to give the relatives a part of the royalties it received from licensing Parks' likeness and image. Parks had assigned those rights to the institute in a 2000 agreement that wasn't part of her estate.

Cohen said the institute reluctantly agreed to sell or license its memorabilia collection to a museum or historical institute and give some of the proceeds to the relatives.

Though the settlement agreement called for [court-appointed family attorneys, John Chase Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr.] to bow out of the proceedings, Cohen said the pair refused to leave and kept billing the estate for fees.

Worse, Cohen said, the pair falsely accused him of divulging details of the confidential settlement agreement during a 2009 Michigan Court of Appeals hearing where the institute unsuccessfully challenged Chase and Jefferson's request for $105,000 in fees.

Even though they weren't parties to the settlement agreement and had no legal standing to do so, Cohen said Chase and Jefferson asked [Wayne County Probate Judge Freddie Burton Jr.] to order the institute and Steele to forfeit Parks' estate assets, including the memorabilia collection.

He said Burton agreed, even though confidentiality disputes were to be submitted to binding arbitration, not Burton, per the settlement agreement. Moreover, Cohen said Burton never allowed the institute to present witnesses, documents or defend itself at a trial before taking the institute's property.
Cohen said Chase and Jefferson never specifically identified what Cohen supposedly disclosed or who heard it.

In early 2010, Cohen said, Burton approved a verbal request that the institute and Steele pay Chase and Jefferson $120,075 for an unexplained claim for fees. Cohen said no trial was ever held.  

If I'm reading this right, not a single request by Rosa Parks was honored by her family.  A couple of judges and a couple of lawyers appear to have colluded to give the family what Rosa Parks herself didn't want them to have.  There's a reason she wanted her estate to go to an institute helping young people realize their potential.  It should be clear to anyone who has ever heard of her.  It's because she was Rosa Parks and it was her legacy.

The Rosa Parks bus before...

And After (Photos courtesy of Henry Ford Museum)

Now the funds are gone and her huge, important memorabilia collection is up for auction at Guernsey's Auctioneers in NY.  If it goes well, the entire collection will stay together and intact at a museum somewhere.  But if Ms. Parks wanted it to stay in Detroit at the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, her own baby, that's where it should be.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.  I could have solved this problem pro bono by simply saying, "Here's the will, there's the door".  But of course nobody asked me. 
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FRIDAY FOLLIES: Big News about Osama, Bad News for Trump, Wacky news from Bloomberg

Well, okay, I guess you've heard the big news of the week--the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden.  Most of us thought the whole operation was pretty impressive--the stealth helicopters, the brave Navy Seals, the efficient execution of the world's worst enemy--it was all good.  But for ex-presidential candidate Donald Trump it was the worst news possible after a really, really horrible weekend.  First, on Saturday night he arrived at the White House Correspondents Dinner thinking he was there as an honored guest of the Washington Post.  He wasn't even suspicious when he was booed in the lobby outside the banquet room. No, he told a reporter, the president wouldn't be mentioning his name.

Once inside and seated he looked around and was pleased to see how much closer to the podium he was than the people behind him.  He ignored the fact that there were people in front of him who were much closer as he observed with dismay that the cameras weren't in a position to be trained on him at all times. But then he perked up when the president did, in fact, mention his name!  And, as is so often the case with Trump, it all went down hill from there.  The president spent many minutes making fun of him, and when Obama sat down, some creep from SNL took over and gave it to him even worse.  The camera finally swung to Trump and caught his scowl, his pout, his utter inability to laugh at the worldview of himself.

On Sunday it was all anyone was talking about.  The embarrassing videos were replayed over and over again and the jokes just kept on coming.  But at least "Celebrity Apprentice" would be airing that night and Trump, in his own mind, saw a vindication in the expected huge numbers of watchers.  Ha!

But alas, it was not to be.  Shortly after 10 PM came an announcement from the White House that the president would be addressing the nation soon on matters of National Security.  Osama Bin Laden was dead.  Immediately the networks cut into regularly scheduled programming and went to their newsrooms.  "You're fired" would not be the highlight of this Sunday night.  Gaahhh!  (The comments on that linked site are hilarious.)




CNN hides video of Star Anchor Wolf Blitzer talking about having to apply his own makeup the night Obama announced bin Laden's death.  If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it myself.  It was at almost precisely 11:40 AM on Monday, May 2 on CNN Newsroom. Drew Griffin asked Wolf to comment on where he was when he heard the news that Obama was going to announce something big at 10:30 PM on Sunday night.  Wolf begins to sputter--apparently he was caught totally off guard by the question, as well as the announcement.  He launches into a play-by-play about getting dressed and rushing to the studio, where he finds--to his utter shock--that there are no makeup people there yet!   He looks around, and grabs the first powder puff he sees and. . .powders his own forehead before going in front of the camera.  (As icing on the cake for this Blitzer watcher, I'm watching in shuddery fascination as a gasping, wide-eyed Wolf pantomimes the patting of the puff on his brow.)

I've looked in vain for the video of this conversation, but it's probably to CNN's credit that they've relegated it to Nowhereland.  (If anybody happens to find it, my gratitude will know no bounds if you pass it along.)  The mystery of the ages is why Blitzer is still on television.  This bizarre exchange on the morning after Osama bin Laden's death deepens the mystery.  He either knows too many secrets or he's somebody's nephew.  Watching him one can drift off and forget that this is real and not SNL.  Who could parody Wolf Blitzer as well as he parodies himself?  As an interviewer he's worse than any sappy local newscaster in the deepest, dustiest hinterlands.  His idea of a brilliant question is either "What were you thinking, as. . .?" or "How horrible was it?"  As he might put it, "Dreadful".

 As if to prove that New York City is the center of all the entire universe, their Mayor Bloomberg has decided it's his job to decree that immigrants wanting to come to the U.S should only be allowed in if they promise to detour around NYC and head to Detroit.  (No, I mean it--this isn't a SNL skit or one of those crazy nightmares we Michiganders are so prone to sweat through.)

This is what he said on "Meet the Press" via the AP: 

“Take a look at the big, old, industrial cities, Detroit, for example,” he said. “They’ve got a great mayor, Mayor (Dave) Bing, but the population has left. You’ve got to do something about that. And if I were the federal government, assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agreed to go to Detroit and live there for five or ten years. Start businesses, take jobs, whatever.”
Detroit has seen its population fall from 1.8 million in the 1950 U.S. Census to 714,000 in 2010. The population dropped 26 percent in the last decade alone.
“You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here,” Bloomberg said. “We still are the world’s greatest democracy. We still have hope that if you want to have a better life for yourself and your kids, this is where you want to come.”

Is that nuts, or what?  Where are these jobs that Bloomberg wants these people to take?  If they were in Detroit what makes him think Detroiters wouldn't be taking them?  Start businesses?  Couldn't Americans who are already here do that if it were that simple?  Nothing at all against immigrants--we've had a few in my family, too--but Bloomberg isn't talking about inviting them to Detroit.  He's talking about forcing them to settle here.  Making a law.  And he said it out loud.  On national television.  Does anybody else think that's weird?

Interesting, too,  that he wants to put immigrants on a fast train to Motown when his own state is losing two congressional seats after the last census count showed a significant drop in population in all but the area in and around New York City.  Has he looked outside lately?

Moment of Sublime:  This morning  at dagblog, William K. Wolfrum posted a link to a self-obituary by Derek Miller, a Canadian blogger who died Tuesday of colorectal cancer.  He asked his family to post his last blog, about his own death, on the day he died.

Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

Photo:  Vancouver Sun

 
You might wonder why I chose this particular story for my Moment of Sublime, but when you read his last blog, you'll understand.  It is about as life-affirming as anything you're ever again going to read.  My heart goes out to his family, but how lucky they were to have him in their lives.  RIP, Derek Miller.


Cartoon of the Week:

A Mike Luckovich cartoon

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Michigan is under siege. Is Anybody Watching?

Right now, [Michigan] Gov. [Rick] Snyder is pushing a bill that would give himself, Gov. Snyder and his administration, the power to declare any town or school district to be in a financial emergency. If a town was declared by the governor and his administration to be in a financial emergency they would get to put somebody in charge of that town, and they want to give that emergency manager that they just put in charge of the town the power to, “reject, modify, or terminate any contracts that the town may have entered in to, including any collective bargaining agreements.”
Rachel Maddow, 3/9/11

If I had been watching anyone but Rachel Maddow last night I never would have believed what I heard.  Rachel, so far, isn't given to exaggeration or hyperbole.  She does her homework.  Her staff has been working tirelessly to get things right.  But I heard what I heard, and what I heard is that Michigan's governor is on his way to one-upping Wisconsin's Governor big time.  He not only wants to kill the unions, he wants to take over whole villages and towns and give them to his own private Genghises of Nottingham.

Rachel:  “What year was your town founded? Does it say so like on the town border as you drive into your town? Does it say what year your town was founded? What did your town’s founding fathers and founding mothers have to go through to incorporate your town? Republicans in Michigan want to be able to unilaterally abolish your town and disincorporate it. Regardless of what you as resident of that town think about it. You don’t even have the right to express an opinion about it through your locally elected officials who represent you, because the Republicans in Michigan say they reserve the right to dismiss your measly elected officials and to do what they want instead because they know best.”

Rachel also had this to say about the proposed bill--the same bill that no one in Michigan seems to think is such a much: “This emergency person also gets the power under the bill to suspend or dismiss elected officials. Think about that for a second. Doesn’t matter who you voted for in Michigan. Doesn’t matter who you elected. Your elected local government can be dismissed at will. The emergency person sent in by the Rick Snyder administration could recommend that a school district be absorbed into another school district. That emergency person is also granted power specifically to disincorporate or dissolve entire city governments.”

And this:  “The version of this bill that passed the Republican controlled Michigan House said it was fine for this emergency power to declare a fiscal emergency invoking all of these extreme powers, it was fine for that power to be held by a corporation. So swaths of Michigan could at the governor’s disposal be handed over to the discretion of a company. You still want your town to exist? Take it up with this board of directors of this corporation that will be overseeing your future now, or rather don’t take it up with them. Frankly, they’re not interested.”
And then there was this from Rachel, who would not lie:  “The power to overrule and suspend elected government justified by a financial emergency. Oh, and how do you know you’re in a financial emergency, because the governor tells you, you’re in a financial emergency, or a company he hires to do so, does that instead. The Senate version of the bill in Michigan says it has to be humans declaring your fiscal emergency. The House bill says a firm can do that just as well.


This is about a lot of things. This is not about a budget. This is using or fabricating crisis to push for an agenda you’d never be able to sell under normal circumstances, and so you have to convince everyone that these are not normal circumstances. These are desperate circumstances and your desperate measures are there for somehow required. What this is has a name. It is called Shock Doctrine.”
 
My God. if it becomes as far-reaching as Rachel suggests (and as the Detroit newspapers sort of hint at, though without any real sense of  panic),  this is gigantic news on the battle front.  This is war, Genghis Khan style. (Sorry, Genghis)  Power-hungry hordes are coming to take over our towns and villages, not with cross-bows and sabers but with the mighty pen struck to the mighty bill.  Our home-grown Genghises came for us not by your typical marauding and force, but by convincing more than half of us dumb schleps that the solution to all our problems requires nothing more than a check-mark next to the R on your ballot.

My thanks to Sarah Jones at PoliticusUsa.com for a great post about Snyder and for the transcription of the most pertinent of Maddow's words about the Republican attack on Michigan.

We have to keep this stuff going.  We have to know our enemies and understand their strategies.  They are ruthless and conniving and laser-beamed on their goals to take over the states and then the entire country.  They bear watching every minute of every day.  We can only do that with millions of eyes upon them and with millions of voices shouting to my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty--This is WRONG!

Pass it on.

ADDENDUM:  click here for HB-4214, passed by Michigan Senate 3/9/2011.