The following guest post was written by Nate Breznau of Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. He is the co-author of a new study that looked at the disparate racial impact of Michigan’s Emergency Manager law, Public Act 436. The academic study proves that the elements involved in the imposition of an Emergency Manager in a city go beyond simple […]

The headlines tell the tale: The Detroit News: Task force: EM decisions led to Flint crisis Detroit Free Press: Task force slams Flint crisis, demands review of emergency manager law The Wall Street Journal: Michigan Officials Responsible for Flint Water Crisis, Panel Finds The Guardian: Flint water crisis was ‘environmental injustice’, governor’s taskforce finds The Washington Post: Scathing independent report […]

The term “Emergency Manager” was not invented by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his corporatist Republican colleagues. In fact, Emergency Managers existed before that crew got around to passing what is perhaps the most anti-democratic legislation ever seen in the United States. According to the U.S. Council of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), Emergency Managers are professionals whose […]

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder began his opening statement before the House Government Oversight Committee hearing on the Flint water crisis by saying, “I am not going to point fingers.” In the same statement and in comments made during questioning, he then blamed the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the failure to […]

Yesterday’s Flint water crisis hearing held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was an astonishing thing to watch. As the beleaguered city is still reeling from the poisoning of its drinking water and the death of at least nine people from Legionnaires’ Disease, one of the men chiefly responsible for the catastrophe declared said that he’s been “unjustly […]

As we know all too well here in Michigan, once an Emergency Manager takes over a city, none of the elected leaders holds any power. In fact, anything they have done up to that point is considered to have been done by an inept, possibly corrupt, group of elected officials. Otherwise, an Emergency Manager wouldn’t have been needed. It’s at […]

With Emergency Managers now a four-letter word in Michigan, the Snyder administration has come up with a new way to take over public schools without having to invoke the epithet. In their on-going effort to “run government like a business”, they have appointed a “School District Chief Executive Officer (CEO)” for East Detroit Public Schools: A chief executive officer will […]

It’s a good gig if you can get it Darnell Earley, the disgraced former Emergency Manager for the city of Flint and, more recently, Detroit Public Schools (DPS), will receive $82,862.90 through mid-July to work as a consultant for the school district. Earley resigned his position last month because, according to his jaw dropping assessment, he had rectified the school […]

The Michigan Democratic Party released shocking documentation this morning showing that a $7 million emergency loan to the city of Flint in April of 2015 came with a very deadly sting attached. Two actually. First, they were not allowed to return to water supplied by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). Second, they were compelled to remain in the Karegnondi Water Authority, a regional water system that won’t be completed until this summer. The two conditions had the effect of forcing Flint to stay with the Flint River as its source of drinking water, a decision that has led to the poisoning of Flint residents with the powerful, odorless, tasteless, invisible neurotoxin lead.

On Monday of this week, Gov. Rick Snyder formally appointed bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes to be the fifth Emergency Manager for Detroit Public Schools (DPS). DPS got their first Emergency Manager (they were called Emergency Financial Managers back then) in 2009 when Robert Bobb was appointed by former governor Jennifer Granholm. The year before Bobb took over, DPS had a […]

NOTE: Those of you who tried to access the site yesterday likely encountered slow load times, frightening “account disabled” warnings, or just a non-loading website. Please accept my profound apology for that. My sodomy post went rapidly viral and overloaded our shared server, taking down all the other sites with it. We have now moved to a new, dedicated (and […]