During the time when the Flint water crisis was unfolding, right wing conservatives spent a lot of time trying to convince the country and the world that it was all the fault of the local government. They portrayed these local leaders as incompetent buffoons who poisoned themselves, countering the reality that the local government officials had literally NO POWER to […]

If you worried that poor, maligned Enbridge Energy was alone in its fight against the monstrous power of Michigan citizens who are desperate to save our Great Lakes from an unimaginable environmental catastrophe, you may now rest easy. A new corporate front group, an “AstroTurf” group as they are frequently called, has come to their aid, posing as, in their […]

It’s taken years of concerted effort but, at long last, Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers can finally claim victory: Teachers in Michigan are now paid less today in both real and corrected-for-inflations dollars. In 2009, the average teacher salary in our state was $63,025. In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, the average was only […]

It’s no secret that Michigan is one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the entire country. Here’s the 11th Congressional District, for example: The 9th District is almost as bad: Note that they are both adjacent and interlocking. The 11th District is highly Republican and 9th District is reliably Democratic. For good measure, here’s the 14th which is another […]

In 2016, Donald Trump got around 37% of the vote from members of labor unions. He actually out-performed Mitt Romney in this regard suggesting that his faux pro-worker rhetoric hit its mark. Since then, he’s continued his attempts to appease union workers and convince them — despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary — that he is on THEIR […]

This past week, corporatists ticked off a major agenda when the United States Supreme Court decided in their favor in the Janus v. AFSCME case. With this decision, SCOTUS has turned America into a “Right to Freeload” country. Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, an affiliate of the Koch brothers State Policy Network (SPN), celebrated the decision to […]

This is becoming indecent… It’s no secret that Michigan Republicans are deeply in the pocket of corporations in our state. One of their first orders of business after taking control of our state government in 2010 was to pass a massive tax cut for corporations paid for by raising the taxes of over half of the residents in our state […]

First we had this: Then we had this: And throughout it all we had food service employees having sex with inmates, rotten, rodent-chewed food being served to prison inmates, and drugs being smuggled into prisons by prison employees. Since 2014, I have written roughly 30 posts about the privatization of prison food services in Michigan and they all tell the […]

“Recent water tests at elementary schools in Flint have found an increase in samples showing lead levels above the federal action limit.” That’s the opening line in an article in The Detroit News less than one month ago. Despite this, the state of Michigan, just days after turning control over the city back to local elected officials, declared the Flint […]

In April of 2012, control over Muskegon Heights schools was handed over to an un-elected Emergency Manager, appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder. By July, Emergency Manager Donald Weatherspoon had signed a contract to turn the entire public school system over to the for-profit charter school operator Mosaica. Two years later the district was still insolvent and having to borrow almost […]

On our podcast this week, self-described zillionaire Nick Hanauer made it clear that trickle down economics is a concept used by the super-wealthy to convince themselves as well as all of us mere mortals that giving tax cuts to rich people will create more jobs and wealth for everyone. Unfortunately for them, as Hanauer says, “it just happens to not […]