Michigan state government, one of the states dominated by Republicans for the governor and legislature, has been in the middle of some of the further right-wing activites such as anti-labor movements and supporting voter id laws and other voter suppression etc. as I recall - but they're out there especially on one issue.
A Republican mantra is that they're against 'big central government', and they want power distributed locally as much as possible (to a certain point).
But Michigan's state government is the most radically anti-local governmen in the nation.
It's their policy to take cities the governor decided are having financial troubles, and just wipe out their elected government, and put a dictator - a 'city manager' - in charge.
No more mayor or city council; contracts such as with labor are torn up. The city manager simply dictates how everything will work.
Now, however well or badly that's gone, it's sure against the ideology they say they're for.
And it raises some troubling questions about valuing democracy. Why not just have Obama remove their state government and put his person in charge?
Now, it so happens that the way it's worked out, half of all African Americans in the state have now lost any local government. No more democracy for them.
As for how it's gone - Rachel Maddow did a report on it, and found only one case where it went well; in a tiny white city of 1,600, they did it for a year and left, no problem.
But in every other case, the city has continued to have the problems; in most, the manager is still there, sometimes after several years; in ones they left, the city went back to the problems and had a manager put back in. In one case, the city manager has been charged with crimes embezzling from the city.
This should be an issue in this country.
Basic rights - from voting in red states across the country to democracy in Michigan - are under attack, pretty much always by Republicans. Of course, the Voting Rights Act - approved by a 98-0 vote for another 25 years in 2006 - is also now under attack by the radical right in the Supreme Court.
Do people take issue with this reduction of democracy, in this thread in particular the state government wiping out local governments, most recently in Detroit?
Are there other suggestions for how to respond to cities in trouble? In CA, a city, Vallejo, went bankrupt, but there's no state takeover.
How do Republicans explain their saying how much they're against more central governments behaving this way, yet their party aggressively doing it in Michigan?
A Republican mantra is that they're against 'big central government', and they want power distributed locally as much as possible (to a certain point).
But Michigan's state government is the most radically anti-local governmen in the nation.
It's their policy to take cities the governor decided are having financial troubles, and just wipe out their elected government, and put a dictator - a 'city manager' - in charge.
No more mayor or city council; contracts such as with labor are torn up. The city manager simply dictates how everything will work.
Now, however well or badly that's gone, it's sure against the ideology they say they're for.
And it raises some troubling questions about valuing democracy. Why not just have Obama remove their state government and put his person in charge?
Now, it so happens that the way it's worked out, half of all African Americans in the state have now lost any local government. No more democracy for them.
As for how it's gone - Rachel Maddow did a report on it, and found only one case where it went well; in a tiny white city of 1,600, they did it for a year and left, no problem.
But in every other case, the city has continued to have the problems; in most, the manager is still there, sometimes after several years; in ones they left, the city went back to the problems and had a manager put back in. In one case, the city manager has been charged with crimes embezzling from the city.
This should be an issue in this country.
Basic rights - from voting in red states across the country to democracy in Michigan - are under attack, pretty much always by Republicans. Of course, the Voting Rights Act - approved by a 98-0 vote for another 25 years in 2006 - is also now under attack by the radical right in the Supreme Court.
Do people take issue with this reduction of democracy, in this thread in particular the state government wiping out local governments, most recently in Detroit?
Are there other suggestions for how to respond to cities in trouble? In CA, a city, Vallejo, went bankrupt, but there's no state takeover.
How do Republicans explain their saying how much they're against more central governments behaving this way, yet their party aggressively doing it in Michigan?
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