Last week, Anne introduced a new feature on Eclectablog – Big Picture – a new way to look at the issues using an engaging visual approach. The first one took a look at Governor Rick Snyder’s harmful impacts on public education in Michigan. You can view that one HERE Today is Anne’s second installment. This one looks at the dangerous […]

The Detroit News published an op-ed yesterday by a man so well-known for being a corporatist shill and profiteer that running it must have been a decision made by the News‘ advertising department. The piece was penned by a Richard Berman and attempts to lay the entire blame for the poor quality of Detroit Public schools at the feet of […]

Stuff just got real Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has been pretty deft at shrugging off the many scandals that have enveloped his administration. But the most recent one, the awarding of $26.4 million in state contracts to a campaign donor might be one he can’t shrug off. Today, my friends at Progress Michigan announced that they have filed a Hatch […]

The best democracy money can buy As we get into the final week of the campaign season before next Tuesday’s election, there is a massive amount of money being spent, mainly on television ads and mailings, trying to sway voters. On the Republican side in Michigan, it’s no secret that one family, the massively wealthy DeVos family, is dominating the […]

The Koch brothers are in the news a lot these days. Yeah, they are written about IN news stories, of course. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The Koch brothers are in the news by actually creating the news in a way that promotes their own corporatist ideology that anything that is good for private corporations is good. Period. […]

This whole “privatize government services to a for-profit corporation” thing is just going so well isn’t it? Prison food vendor Aramark has stubbed its toe a few times, but, hey, we have to “work with them”, as Governor Snyder put it. And by stubbing their toe, I mean: Running out of food Making unauthorized food substitutions in violation of their […]

Gov. Rick Snyder may have thought the drumbeat of scandals with for-profit prison food vendor Aramark was behind him in the last two weeks of the election. But he was wrong. A former Aramark employee has come forward to talk about serving raw meat and undercooked meat and meat-based food to inmates. Even after she brought the situation to the […]

Tomorrow, October 23rd at 1:00, the Education Achievement Authority, Gov. Rick Snyder’s failed experiment with Detroit school children, will hold a board meeting at the downtown campus of Wayne County Community College. Following that, at 4:00 p.m., on the campus of the University of Michigan, a public forum will be held called “The Future of Education in Detroit – The […]

I have been following Tesla Motors for many years. They are one of the most exciting companies to start up in the past decade, producing all-electric vehicles that are attractive, powerful, and that represent a true breakthrough in technology, especially from the battery side. And they have done it largely without government assistance, to boot. No government body has had […]

This post has been updated with comments from Democratic candidate Paul Clements. After the crowd-funded MaydayPAC announced they’d be spending $1.5 million to defeat Republican Fred Upton in MI-06, he turned to social media to decry what he called the “shadowy” group started by “Harvard millionaire” Lawrence Lessig (who is not a millionaire, by the way.) But he didn’t stop […]

Since the middle of July, David Trott, Michigan’s most infamous Foreclosure Vulture, has raised nearly $200,000 from a wide array of bankers, Trott & Trott employees, real estate investors, attorneys, and various PACs like the NRA, GM, Ford, DTE Energy, Quicken Loans, and Koch Industries. But, during that same time, he racked up donations of $1,190,174.33. Where did the other […]