Okay, I've been sitting around on this for more than a week now. Partly because it's such a pile to grapple with, and partly because I've never shaken my procrastination habits. But the time has come to try to describe what the heck is going on in Michigan. This is a pretty long and rambling tale, but it all comes together in the end, so bear with me as I do my best not to sound conspiratorial.
It's worth starting off by mentioning a thing or two about Benton Harbor, Michigan. It's on one side of a river from the town of St. Joseph, together they're about 19 thousand people. According to the 2010 census, St. Joseph is about 90% White, with a per capita income of $33k; Benton Harbor is about 90% Black, with a a per capita income of $10k, and every form of social blight one can imagine. Benton Harbor, like much of Michigan, used to be an industrial town, and is still today technically the world headquarters of the Whirlpool corporation, although they no longer have any edifice there except the executive offices themselves (and a call center). If you missed it, Benton Harbor was the first town to have its
town council suspended by an emergency manager - forbidding the council to take any action except hold and record meetings.
This whole thing kicked off with
Michigan's "Financial Martial Law" bill, which you can read all about by typing as little as "michigan fin" into Google, and it's important to talk about exactly where this law came from. Now, very few laws introduced to any legislature are actually written by a congressman or their staff; most are written by the various lobbies and interest groups that they pertain to, and are sent to somebody who can introduce as advocation. There's nothing inherently wrong with this process, writing a law is a highly technical and laborious undertaking, and so if the bulk of introductory law-writing is going to be "outsourced", it stands to reason it'll be taken up by people with an interest in the outcome. But obviously, it's good to know where a bill originated if it came from the outside, and this one is pretty illuminating.
Now, I hope nobody is going to badmouth Mother Jones Magazine, but even if they do, Andy Kroll is a good journalist and a Michigander to boot. And the long and short of
his investigating was that the bill came from the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy. A quick look at their frontpage should tell you what kind of policies the Center advocates. The Mackinac Center (it's pronounced "mack-eh-naw" by the way) is similar to groups in most every area, essentially a state-level mirror of the American Chamber of Commerce. The Center, run by a minor-league gallery of Republican party alumni, collects money almost exclusively from corporations, and individuals and foundations representing business founders and interests, and they don't like to disclose who those donors are. Pairing up tax records counts among those donors the Koch Charitable Foundation (representing the two billionaires among the Koch family), the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation (named for the parents of its director, Holland MI native and now of the Abu Dhabi, Erik Prince, legacy CEO of
Xe Services)... and the Whirlpool Corporation, which the Center has gone to pains to
defend in the past when tax breaks didn't magically save the company from downsizing and outsourcing. Now it's perfectly within any groups right to operate exactly as the Mackinac Center does, just as it was perfectly within the group's right to have its finances explode in the last election with the
Citizens United decision, which is totally absolutely irrelevant.
Okay, so a political funding group that wants businesses to be tax-free and law-free writes a bill proposal to give the governor unilateral power to put towns under the auspices of financial firms he likes. No biggie. But the Center can't just introduce a bill, they have to get a legislator to sponsor it, and who did they get? From the document linked at the top,
newly elected Representative Al Pscholka (R), private-education advocate and former staffer of
Federal Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI). Why does is that worth noting? Because Fred Upton is the grandson of Whirlpool's founder and heir to the family-owned portion of the company, and not-at-all-coincidentally his district includes Benton Harbor. As does Al Pscholka's. Still with me? Good.
But what exactly is happening in Benton Harbor, now that the town council has been barred from doing anything but existing? Well, there's been a little
real-estate project in development in Benton Harbor for a couple years now, a private gated community of gigantic houses and artificial rivers and such, catering to Whirlpool executives and Chicago businessmen who want a weekend house. And it would like to expand a bit, including adding a golf course and more vacation-oriented business, calling itself
Harbor Shores Resort. Harbor Shores is already trying to expand its name recognition by hosting the PGA tournament next year, except they have a little snag - the golf course doesn't actually exist yet. Every picture on the site, including the little commercial, is made of stock-footage. A good chunk of the course is slated to be built on what is currently
Jean Klock Park, a public beach donated to the city in 1917, back when millionaires occasionally gave a damn about the little people living in the same town. Now, the development deal was made several years ago, but has been tied up in litigation ever since. It should come as no surprised that a town as troubled as Benton Harbor would have a few crooked dealmakers. Nonetheless, the deal still isn't sealed, but with the Emergency Manager (who himself certainly predates the law) having barred the town's government from representing itself in any official capacity, and having claimed the power through the new law to do that himself, there's basically nothing to keep the case from being ruled on (the town government is automatically a defendant alongside the developer, but the council had been stalling the deal since
it started in 2008, to give the plaintiffs more time). Remember that the Manager essentially has the unilateral (still) power to dis-incorporate land at his discretion.
And if you're wondering if anyone else in Michigan has some problems with this, or why I bothered talking about the Mackinac Center, the answer to both is themselves. Shortly after the law passed and signed, the Mackinac Center sent a letter to the Michigan Attorney General, filing a Freedom of Information Act Request for
any and all emails between state college professors and staff mentioning the hootenanny in Wisconsin politics going on at the time... and "Maddow", as in
"Rachel Maddow", NPR and MSNBC host. If you're rightly thinking "surely they meant some other Maddow", the Center confirmed it themselves in a
long-winded "explanation" about why they had the right to make the FOIA request, specifically citing Maddow's criticism of the law as part of their criterion, without actually explaining why they were doing it, aside from a lot of vague intonations about "possible illegal activity". Namely, that discussion between professors about politics in another state and some criticism by one very particular talkshow host is tantamount to misappropriating state funds for partisan campaigning, something the Center has apparently been trying to
pin to state colleges for years.
tl;dr run-on sentence - A brand new representative, political understudy of the heir of a major Michigan corporation, is elected to the Michigan state house, and immediately introduces a bill that would give existing Emergency Financial Managers nearly unlimited power to run the business of cities; the first use of this law is to fast-track a resort development deal in said-company's backyard, in a town said-representative "represents"; all originated and lobbied by a group representing the money of the likes of Koch Industries, WalMart, and motherfucking Blackwater, and has apparently appointed itself the Thought Police of anyone connected to state funding, to root out undesirable activity like criticizing its policies or watching MSNBC.
I've always liked to think I'm a patient and reasonable man. No really. When I hear people saying the sky is falling, I always think, surely the details will explain how everything is barely different than it already was. The wheels of change grind incredibly fine, and we can all see far enough down the road to change course. Surely, I always think, whatever "it" is, it can't be that bad. This time, yeah, it really is that bad.
I'm perfectly aware that the story and chain of events is not necessary so clean-cut. That there's a lot of little hiccups, and that even the strongest coincidence can still easily be just that. I'm also perfectly aware that if I had bothered to post this one day earlier, I would have had to eat some crow when the
Jean Klock Park lawsuit became a federal case. But when you see all the disparate pieces laid out in a row, you don't need a conspiracy theory to be alarmed by the scope of the issue. It doesn't need to be a conspiracy to be a genuinely dangerous conflation of interests and legal power.
It's entirely possible that the Benton Harbor deal will fall through in court. If it does, and with citizens' groups only ally in the government now silenced by their Manager that's not exactly likely, you can rest assured that the stupendous amounts of political influence that was backing the deal is going to try again another way. And Benton Harbor is hardly the only town in Michigan with dire financial problems and yet still plenty left to lose. This is no longer an ephemeral issue, there's no longer any need to wonder about how this "Financial Martial Law" bill will be put to use. Whether it fails in Benton Harbor, it will return and succeed elsewhere, and this is what the Michigan state government has evolved into, with this and any other laws that may be coming down the pipe: Giving unanswerable power to unaccountable flunkies to unilaterally chop off public resources for private backers and silence anyone who has a problem with it. All hail the Corporatocracy.
Governor Rick Snyder is scheduled to
visit neighboring St. Joseph next week as Marshal of the
Blossomtime Festival Parade. I'm sure everyone in the area will turn out, to make it a visit to remember.
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Topic: The Dissolution of State Government (Read 41688 times)