As we've seen, it's standard operating procedure for Republican governors to balance state budgets on the backs of the poor and working class. Insofar that there's anything to distinguish one governor from another, it's in the details: Wisconsin's Scott Walker wants to break unions and cut benefits, Florida's Rick Scott wants to flash Medicaid, and Michigan's Rick Snyder wants to impose martial law. Rinku Sen reports:
Last week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. Now he can declare any city or district in financial emergency, appoint an emergency manager (at county, city, district or township level) and give that person the power to control budgets, sell off assets, bypass city councils and boards of education, take over school systems, de-certify pubic unions, and even to dissolve the city itself as an entity. This is corporate martial law—it won’t be the military taking over, but business interests that constitute an authoritarian regime.
With this law, Snyder has effectively transformed himself into the Grand Moff of Michigan; as the editors of Central Michigan Life, note, "There is nothing stopping Snyder from declaring financial emergencies in municipalities whose officials he has a problem with, appointing his friends from corporate circles as the emergency managers who would then run the municipality in the way most profitable to themselves."
I can't help but notice the racial dimensions of this policy, especially in light of the GOP attempt to "Southernize" the economies of the Midwest and Rust Belt. As Sen points out, Snyder has targeted low-income and majority-black cities for "financial emergency" status, effectively stripping them of their right to self-governance. I'm not surprised that this power grab will most harm the least well-off, but it does sound uncomfortably similar to governance regimes in the Jim Crow South, where white officials blocked blacks and other minorities from positions of political power and used their near dictatorial powers to break unions, defund (black) public schools, and allow wealthy interests to run roughshod over the area.
Of course, given Snyder's Tea Party sympathies, this attack on democratic self-governance might actually just be a new kind of "freedom" that I don't understand.
