After Attorney General Bill Schuette’s bombshell charges against two former Flint Emergency Managers last week, Flint is back in the news and, as usual, is a complete embarrassment to our state. First, we have news this morning that an Assistant Attorney General in Bill Schuette’s office signed off on an administrative consent order that led to the charges being filed […]

Another #fakenews story is being promoted by the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), Betsy DeVos’s personally founded and funded school privatization guerrilla organization in Michigan. The mother quoted here, Maria Salazar, has been writing a version of this article for Betsy-DeVos-funded organizations since at least 2013: this one, from the American Federation for Children–a DeVos voucher front group–introduces us to Maria’s […]

Dems need to pick a fight, and it must start with Tom Price’s confirmation hearing In a must-read New York Times‘ op-ed “The Quiet War on Medicaid,” Ann Arbor-native and Clinton/Obama administration veteran Gene Sperling sounds a warning that needs to be blasted out at high volumes at all hours. Republicans are definitely coming for Medicaid. And if they’re aren’t […]

“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my […]

[This post is inspired by a recent masterful piece by one of my real role models as a writer on all topics related to education: Peter Greene, the author of Curmudgication. Thank you, Peter, for so beautifully capturing the frustration that so many teachers feel about the standards and testing movement that seems to be dominating our work in the […]

The following guest post was written by Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO. You can sign up to receive legislative action alerts from the Michigan AFL-CIO HERE. You can also follow them at facebook.com/miaflcio, twitter.com/miaflcio, and twitter.com/ronbiebermi. Enjoy. Lame duck sessions are when bad bills happen to good people. That’s been true in Michigan after every major election since […]

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, John’s 22-year-old son remained covered under his insurance, just when they needed it most. It wasn’t your typical nosebleed. When John came home from his job as a union tradesman one day in August, his son had a “gusher” of a nosebleed, he says. John immediately saw his son needed to be in the […]

With the bombshell news yesterday that two former Flint Emergency Managers are being charged with felonies in their connection to the ongoing tragedy known as the Flint water crisis, the calls to repeal Michigan’s anti-democratic “financial martial law” are rising again from around the state. The corporatists that see Emergency Management as a key to accomplishing their dual goals of […]

How least qualified man beat the most qualified woman History will probably only remember it for purposes of mockery but something amazing happened in 2016 — and no one seemed to notice how remarkable it was. Actually, that turned out to be exactly what went wrong. For much of the year, experts and non-experts of all sorts spent time speculating […]

There is a whole lot of news to report about the ongoing tragedy in Flint, Michigan where the drinking water of tens of thousands of city residents was poisoned with the powerful neurotoxin lead through actions taken by state-appointed Emergency Managers. The biggest news of the day is that Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette is bringing charges against two Emergency […]

The image at the top of this post was once the Twitter banner of billionaire Betsy DeVos until she got busted for it. What makes the image so controversial is the blatant product placement. Those little white boxes that look like something out of the movie Repo Man are for a “boxed water” product sold by the company Boxed Water […]