How they must laugh at us.
For 39 long minutes, Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder marched through Benton Harbor with 500 protesters and their thundering chants escorting him. Demonstrators protested Snyder's new law, which threatens to nullify local democracy.
Benton Harbor, in the southwest corner of the state on Lake Michigan, is the first town picked by Snyder to flex his muscle under a new law that exponentially expanded the power of emergency managers over local governments or school districts with financial problems.
A slew of managers are in training; they will have the power to cancel union contracts, dismiss elected bodies, sell public assets, and privatize public services.
Within a month of the law’s passage, Joseph Harris, Benton Harbor’s previously appointed emergency manager, suspended the powers of the city commission, forbidding any action by elected officials without his permission.
http://labornotes.org/2011/05/michigan-governor-takes-walk-shame-benton-harbor
