MLK Day's March on Michissippi's (Michigan's) Dictator Gov. Rick Snyder's gated estate/mansion

Well over a thousand citizens from all around Michissippi (Michigan) rallied to march on Martin Luther King Day to Rick Snyder's gated estate. They were motivated by the racial implications of Snyder's imposition of dictatorial control over predominately Black communities in Michigan.

The Emergency Manager "plantations" established by Snyder's Legal Beavers and legal corporations (under his direct control) have begun the re-enslavement of Michigan's poorest citizens, people largely living in governmental units racially abandoned to minorities. These units are now being systematically stripped of the rights of citizenship-for their "own good" by a business-first Big Boss-Rick Snyder.

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It boils down to voting rights, civil rights, and local control of local affairs. The growing sense of inequality imposed by the GOP-dominated Michigan government, having total control of all three branches of state government, is bringing the public outcry to a boil.

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Bill Moyers outlines the current national, intense and growing sense of inequality. Moyers writes below that Americans are just now "waking up" to the danger posed by the impacts such Snyder's have on working people, the 99%:

Waking up is right.

Waking up to the reality that inequality matters.

• It matters because what we're talking about is what it takes to live a decent life.
• If you get sick without health coverage, inequality matters. If you're the only breadwinner and out of work, inequality matters.
• If your local public library closes down and you can't afford to buy books on your own, inequality matters.
• If budget cuts mean your child has to pay to play on the school basketball team or to sing in the chorus or march in the band, inequality matters.
• If you lose your job as you're about to retire, inequality matters.
• If the financial system collapses and knocks the props from beneath your pension, inequality matters.

I (Bill Moyers) grew up in a working class family. We were among the poorest in town, but I was rich in public goods.

I went to a good public school, played sandlot ball in a good public park, had access to a good public library, drove down a good public highway to a good public college, all made possible by people I never met. There was an unwritten bargain among the generations - we didn't all get the same deal, but we did get civilization.
That bargain is being shredded.

The occupiers of Wall Street understand this. You could tell from their slogans.

A fellow young enough to be my grandson wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the words: "The system's not broken. It's fixed." That's right. Rigged. And that's why so many are so angry. Not at wealth itself, but at the crony capitalists who resorts to tricks, loopholes, and hard, cold cash for politicians to make sure insiders prosper and then pull up the ladder behind them.
Yes, Americans are waking up.

• To how they're being made to pay for Wall Street's malfeasance and Washington's complicity. Paying with stagnant wages and lost jobs, with slashing cuts to their benefits and to their social services.
• And waking up to the grotesque Supreme Court decision defining a corporation as a person, although it doesn't eat, breath, make love or sing, or take care of children and aging parents.
• Waking up to how campaign contributions corrupt our elections; to the fact that if speech is money, no money means no speech.

So the collective cry has gone up loud and clear: enough's enough.

We won't, as I said, know for a while if this is just a momentary cry of pain; or whether it's a movement that, like the Abolitionists and Suffragettes, the populists and workers of another era, or the Civil Rights movement of our time, gathers force until the powers-that-be can no longer sustain the inequality, the injustice and yes, the immorality of winner-take-all politics.

See Related Interviews on which this Essay is based and a Related Op-Ed:
Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson on Engineered Inequality (Jan 13, 2012)
America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters (Jan 18, 2012)


Original.