Bankrupt Detroit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So Detroit, to no one's surprise, has filed for bankruptcy. Such is what has happened to what was once one of the great American cities:

Detroit, the cradle of America's automobile industry and once the nation’s fourth-most-populous city, has filed for bankruptcy, an official said Thursday afternoon, the largest American city ever to take such a course.

The decision to turn to the federal courts, which required approval from both the emergency manager assigned to oversee the troubled city and from Gov. Rick Snyder, is also the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history in terms of debt.

New York magazine notes optimistically that "a bankruptcy proceeding will allow the city to shed some of the billions of dollars of liability it has and get something close to a fresh start" -- and so maybe this is the start of a long rebuilding process that will see the city prosper once again.

Or maybe not. After all, where is the money for rebuilding supposed to come from? What would the source of any future prosperity be? Will businesses ever return in significant numbers? Will people ever return? And if not, what do you do with a large and largely dilapidated city that has passed the point of no return? Would it just go the way of the cities of antiquity, falling ever further into ruin, one day perhaps a destination for historians and archeologists?

Whatever the case, Detroit's demise, like the demise of industrial America generally, is a sad thing. And if you want to know how it all happened, watch this video:

What Happened To Detroit?! from Publius on Vimeo.

Getting it

By Mustang Bobby

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has decided to veto a bill that would have allowed concealed weapons in such places as schools, day care centers, sports arenas, bars, places of worship, hospitals, dorms, and casinos. The bill had been passed by the legislature the night before the massacre in Connecticut.

That might have had something to do with his decision to back away from the bill.

So might this:

The approval rating of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is in the gutter, according to a poll released Tuesday, the strongest evidence yet of the political perils associated with the right-to-work legislation he signed into law last week.

According to the latest automated survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, only 38 percent of Michigan voters approve of the job Snyder is doing, compared with 56 percent who disapprove. In PPP's previous survey of Michigan in November, Snyder's approval rating was 10 points above water: 47 percent of voters approved of his performance as governor, while 37 percent disapproved.

The right-to-work bill, signed by Snyder amid mass protests, appears to have changed the political climate in the Great Lake State. Fifty-one percent of Michigan voters oppose the bill, which made Michigan the country's 24th right-to-work state, while 41 percent support the legislation. Moreover, Snyder trails every Democrat in hypothetical matchups of the 2014 gubernatorial election.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing focuses the mind like impending political oblivion. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Railroading right-to-work

By Mustang Bobby

Laura Conaway at The Maddow Blog has a good summary of the rush by the Michigan legislature to pass right-to-work in the state where the modern labor movement was born:

Right to Work legislation has moved through so quickly that one Republican lawmaker voted against it because, he said, "We literally weren't given the legislation to read until minutes before voting." From experience with Right to Work in other states, conservatives and liberals agree that the rule is catastrophic for unions, with significant cuts in membership, and lower wages and benefits.

What's all the more interesting is that up until about twenty minutes ago, Gov. Rick Snyder had no interest in passing right-to-work and he was bragging about how well the state was doing in terms of the economic recovery (i.e., GM and Chrysler's rebound). Now all of a sudden the economy is on the edge of going under unless this law passes.

If, as the Republicans are always telling us, the labor union movement is dying and has no power left to wield, why do they suddenly need this kind of legislation in the first place?

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

No rights at work in Michigan

By Frank Moraes 

I'm thinking of starting a weekly rundown of the best writing I find online, because a lot of it doesn't get mentioned here because I have nothing to add. That is very much true of John Nichols at The Nation who manages to write brilliantly on the local and national level. This evening, he wrote an article that gave me a little bit of hope about Michigan, "GOP, Koch Brothers Sneak Attack Guts Labor Rights in Michigan."

As you have likely heard, the Michigan senate managed to ram through a right-to-work bill and it is certain to be passed by the house and signed by Governor Rick Snyder. Unfortunately -- and I think this is a big part of its power -- most people are confused about what right-to-work means. It certainly sounds like a good thing; who could be against more rights?! But as with similarly Orwellian phraseology like the Clear Skies Act, it is bad. Nichols suggests the term "no-rights-at-work."

Read more »

Wisconsin, don't despair. It's not you, it's them.

By Ramona

As much as we all sorely wished that the recall effort in Wisconsin would succeed, I don't know many people who were actually shocked when it failed on Tuesday. The odds against winning were formidable. The recallers gathered thousands more signatures that they would ever need and it looked like that fact alone might carry them along to success, but Big Money fought the recall, turning the image of valued public employees into thoughtless money-grabbers at a time when belts had to be tightened. They portrayed Scott Walker as a tough, savvy, pro-business leader who was willing to take on the union-heavy public institutions responsible for dragging the state down. That was the story, and the voters bought it.

In Wisconsin, the recall effort was an actual election, pitting Governor Walker against his 2010 gubernatorial opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who seemed like a nice guy with a compelling promise to bring fair, honest governance back to that state but who, in the end, couldn't make the case broadly enough.

The word on the street the morning after the election was that voters thought recalls should be used against more egregious actions by a sitting governor. Killing the chances at collective bargaining for all public workers apparently didn't fit the bill. The word on the street was that nobody cares about unions anyway, and good riddance to them.

The word on the street was that Wisconsin is and always has been an unpredictable state and that this was a colossal waste of money and effort, no matter how many signatures were gathered and no matter how worthy the message. (Not much mention of the tens of millions of dollars Walker's buddies threw into the race to keep his regime going.)

Michigan Rising, an organization working to gather signatures for Governor Rick Snyder's recall,  announced on Wednesday that it is calling off the recall challenge. An effort to gather enough signatures fell embarrassingly short, and the loss in Wisconsin became reason enough to end it. 

We know now that recalls aren't the best way to protest. The fact that only two governors in our country's entire history have ever been recalled, and that Scott Walker was only the third to ever have been challenged, says something about the chances for success. The chances were pretty much nil from the start.

We liberal activists are getting used to failure, and getting used to failure is not a healthy thing. It's demoralizing and it's way too easy in the aftermath to just give up. It isn't that our hearts aren't in it, or that we don't take the fight seriously. It's that we've never run into such concerted, committed opposition before, and we don't have a clue about how to handle it. We're fighting a vast faction with a mighty war chest bent on taking over this country by making our own government work against us. The proof is out there, practically in neon lights, that Republican governors of many of our states have signed up for the takeover.

They follow an agenda set out for them by right-wing organizations fully capable of fighting the battle for the states all the way to the end, and they're determined not to stop there. They've forced nearly every single Republican politician to sign a pledge never to raise taxes or their funding will dry up as quick as dung in the desert sun. It's the Grover Norquist plan, and even though Grover Norquist has no real credentials, he is the frontrunning Republican rule-maker and nobody in his party ever seems to wonder who died and made him king.

The diabolically clever part of the "never raise taxes" plan is that it can be used to effectively kill any program the Republicans are against. Any social program, any essential safety net, can die an unnatural death by defunding, underfunding or outright abolishing, thanks to the new rules set in place by the likes of Norquist, ALEC, the Koch cabal, the Supreme Court Citizens United decision, and various Tea Party newbies in the House who have promised to shed real red blood if necessary in order to honor the edicts of the monied right wing.

As David Horsey wrote in yesterday's L.A. Times:

Occupy Wall Street enthusiasts can camp out on the sidewalk and conduct their exquisitely egalitarian group discussions. Anarchists can gleefully smash windows at Bank of America and Starbucks. Union members can set up phone banks and carry picket signs. But as long as elections are there to be bought, a handful of billionaires will have a far louder voice in who runs the country than all the activists on the left combined.

As a country, we've dug ourselves into a hole so deep daylight is but a distant dream. The news from Wisconsin is not good but it can't be the end. We liberals and progressives can win this thing if we work together and build our own formidable counteracting factions. (See Bernie Sanders.) It's our only chance and we can only get it done if we set aside our differences and work together with one goal in mind: That saving our country is a cause worth fighting for.

There is a truly frightening enemy out there and it isn't us. Not any of us.

Romney and Santorum and inequality

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yesterday, Bill Burton, former Obama White House deputy press secretary, tweeted the following:

In 2010, Santorum made $983,000 and paid 28.5% in taxes. In 2010, Romney made $21.7 million and paid 13.9% in taxes. 

So unfair. So unjust. (Seriously.)

But at least Santorum got Megadeath's Dave Mustaine's endorsement. That's... positive... right? I mean, he's a major... cultural... figure... who will bring in masses of metalhead votes. Take that, Mitt!

Oh, right, Romney got Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's endorsement.

What's better -- the governor's support with the primary coming up or having half the tax rate of your opponent?

Doesn't matter. Romney has both.

So very, very unfair.

In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder's popularity plummets as he attacks labor unions

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In Michigan, Governor (and would-be autocrat) Rick Snyder is deeply unpopular, not least because he has pulled a Scott Walker and attacked labor unions (and working people generally):

Last November, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) won a decisive 18 point victory in his race for the governor's mansion. Yet after less than three months of draconian budget proposals and unconstitutional assaults on collective bargaining, Snyder is hurting. A new poll finds that Snyder would lose his election if it were held today, and that a strong plurality of the state would support amending the state constitution to prevent Snyder from continuing his anti-union agenda:

Snyder's also earned the ire of the voters because of the perception that he's targeting collective bargaining rights. 59% of folks in Michigan think that public employees should have the right to collective bargaining while only 32% are opposed, and 49% of voters even favor a state constitutional amendment to guarantee collective bargaining rights while 37% are opposed to such a measure. While union households are obviously the most supportive of collective bargaining, nonunion households support it by a 53/39 margin as well so the voters Snyder is antagonizing on this issue go beyond who you might expect.

It's hard to see how anti-labor politics would ever go over well in Michigan of all places, but Snyder's clear overreach, against an overwhelming majority of the electorate (an electorate that has a long and distinguished union history and that has suffered some of the worst consequences of the Great Recession), shows just how extremist and out of touch Republicans are these days, both in that state and elsewhere. 

And now the people of Michigan, assaulted by their Republican governor (whom far too many trusted to be not this extreme, evidence of widespread delusion), may go so far as to try to amend the state constitution to safeguard their rights. They should have known better at the ballot box when they voted Republican, but this may be the only way to ensure that right-wing efforts to dismantle democracy, which won't end with Snyder, are blocked for good.

Well, another way is to vote Snyder and his Republican allies out of office at the first opportunity. Let's hope Michigan doesn't repeat its recent electoral errors.

Michigan power grab

By Mustang Bobby.

Via Steve Benen comes a story about the new governor of Michigan being granted basically limitless power to do anything he wants.

Newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder, is set to pass one of the most sweeping, anti-democratic pieces of legislation in the country -- and almost no one is talking about it.

Snyder's law gives the state government the power not only to break up unions, but to dissolve entire local governments and place appointed "Emergency Managers" in their stead. But that's not all -- whole cities could be eliminated if Emergency Managers and the governor choose to do so. And Snyder can fire elected officials unilaterally, without any input from voters. It doesn't get much more anti-Democratic than that.

Except it does. The governor simply has to declare a financial emergency to invoke these powers -- or he can hire a private company to declare financial emergency and take over oversight of the city. That's right, a private corporation can declare your city in a state of financial emergency and send in its Emergency Manager, fire your elected officials, and reap the benefits of the ensuing state contracts.  [Italics in the original.]

Ironically, this was the kind of thing all the tea-partiers were screaming about last year that President Obama was plotting to do with the stimulus and healthcare law: he's a tyrant who will stop at nothing to take away the power from the people and turn it over to the bureaucrats and the evil Soshulists.  So, naturally, you'd think that the tea-folk in Michigan would be apoplectic about this.  Well, you would be wrong.  They're delighted with it.

One of the Republican state lawmakers who supports this effort characterized the plan as "financial martial law" -- and as far as he's concerned, that's not a criticism, that a defense for this little scheme.

Rule Number 1 of Dictators: It's not tyranny when we do it; it's "emergency powers." (See: Mubarak, Hosni; Castro, Fidel & Raul).

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)