Paul Ryan’s Evil Goddess: Ayn Rand’s Atheistic & Wanton Destruction of Public Life & Common Good

Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan Evil Goddess: She just won't go away, despite hiding Ryan's past worship under a rock, the Mormon Mitt Romney

Perhaps no one represents a more direct and serious threat to the public welfare today than Paul Ryan. A foolish and self assured rebel who heads up the Randian Crusade into the abyss (See “Ayn Rand Extreme Capitalism's Goddess of Selfishness 160 Current Economic Undertow”). Paul Ryan’s are the tenets representative of the kinds of greed and raw Corporatocracy (See also “The Virtue of Selfishness”) that festoon themselves as the New Traditionalism, a harsh route offered the country by the Romney/Ryan ticket.

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” -- Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

The 2012 loyal base of the Republican Party, best described as Southern White Males (Texas Born-agains) with racial overtones, has no clue as to the utter reversal of brotherly love and American Exceptionalism that waits in the wings with Ryan and the supremacy and ascendancy of rogue powers such as the anti-public service and anti-government fanaticism and billionaire power-lust of the Koch Brothers, Americans for Prosperity and acolytes such as Kingmaker Karl Rove and his Citizens United “tool” Crossroads GPS, Ralph Reed, and now the beguiled religious players including Franklin Graham & Mark DeMoss, of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (See “Why is Billy Graham so involved in the 2012 elections?” on the Christian Century).

This march to the brink of doom for public life and shared responsibility for ones neighbor is so clearly the modern analogy of the lemmings unstoppable plunge off the civic cliff into the sea of chaos into the deep and dark turbulent waters of national nihilism visiting again the manifestation of misplaced power and the rule of the many by the so few. American Know Nothing religionists having gone deep into national politics represent a cohort of groups suffering from a kind of partisan and sectarian auto-immune disorder -- an inability to cope with what they perceive as foreign pathogens in their universe; threats to their bigotry and “moral “absolutism.

"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing...a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." --Aldous Huxley, 1959

We are seeing the unraveling of civility and common sense. It’s the dark night, the miasma of evil ideology and rank divisiveness, which serves the few, the One Percent. (See “The 99 Percent for the 100 Percent: The Case for Deep Patriotism” in The Nation). We saw its apex in the debacle of 1929 and again we see it now. Yet many feel that we, as a social gathering of all the traditions and social groups of the world under one roof—America’s Big Tent of representative democracy, can tolerate and survive this quagmire of fraud and rules bending.

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the laws secure equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit.

Neither is poverty a bar, for a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his conditions. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourses we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not give him sour looks which, though harmless, are not pleasant". -- Pericles (Athenian statesman, 5th century B.C.)

We cannot survive as a viable nation if we cannot stave off such an erosion of “full faith and confidence” in self-government that is giving unfair and unequal advantage to the few. Will we tear down, with malice what our Fore founders erected to save mankind from the tyranny, by continuing to allow the concentration of such daemonic power in the hands of so few?

God forbid.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis spoke stern warning: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Rue the day Paul Ryan gave his heart to the pagan, sexpot, and anarchist, Ayn Rand, (aka Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum) the temptress of the sons of Baal. We shall all taste the sweet, thirst slacking waters of democracy turned bitter and acridly poisonous by the powdered shards of the Golden Calf made into a corrective diuretic by the God of the Ages, who punishes the foolishness and the disregard of the mighty toward the welfare of the many. “For God so loved the whole world he sent his only begotten son… that they should not perish….”

"The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few of many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is democracy". -- Aristotle

"There is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic system are simple. "They are:

• Equality of opportunity for youth and others;
• Jobs for those who can work;
• Security for those who need it;
• The ending of the special privileges for the few;
• The preservation of civil liberties for all;
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt

On the Reader:

“Barack Obama Doesn’t Think Ayn Rand is a ‘Fountainhead’ of Ideas” by By Lyneka Little in the Wall Street Journal on October 26, 2012. 

Related Slates:

Ayn Rand Speaking With Precision for the 99 % (November 2011) - Just-Leave-Me-Alone Tea Party Hero John Galt BePraised: The High Hypocrisy of Galt’s Creator, Ayn Rand (April 2011) - Saint Ayn - Extolling Great Evil - Used As Source of TeaParty Political Punch Lines (April 2011) - Much Ado About Evil: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (April 2011)

Posted by guest commentator Morton M.

Michigan’s Carnival of Economic Carnality: Who Runs Rick Snyder?

The interlocking overlords of Michigan run the agenda presented by the Detroit News - their main newsprint outlet. The behind the scenes sponsors and originators, controllers of the flow of managed and contrived information and agenda opinion are those who are principals in both the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Business Leaders for Michigan (BLM) add in the untoward influence and direct access to Michigan law making via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Michigan is a generator of ALEC models and has over 100 past or present legislators who are members (including the MI GOP's new national committee man Dave Agema) and you have the lockbox from which the TeaPublican/Snyder/Elites pull the plan that determines the future economy and the range of freedom for most Michiganians.

Take US Rep. Dave Agema, a robotic ALEC lackey:

"MI HB-4305 Sec. 4.1 (PDF) contains language that is pretty much, word for word, cribbed from ALEC model legislation 7K5, Sec. 2 (A) (PDF).  The Michigan legislation was "plug and played" directly into a bill-unedited or lightly amended) was sponsored by Rep. Dave Agema, an ALEC Member."

Brilliant hod-carrying for the corporatocracy statesman Dave!

Foreign Written Sharia Law is Bad, but Multinational Corporations (with foreign ownership) Writing 'Cut & Paste' Laws Good: Michigan US Rep Dave Agema presents his proposed HM 4769 American Laws for American Courts or ALAC bill in Lansing, MI on May 10, 2012 after being introduced by Alan Cropsey from Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette's office.

Most of the activity of the overlords is done in secret and sub-rosa. Little is known about who actually contributes to the Mackinac Center. This aggressive and anti-worker propaganda mill was set up by Richard McLellan esq. and John Mathias Engler along with others whose model was drawn from that of the Heritage Foundation which in turn was funded and boosted, early on, by both Richard (Rich) M. DeVos Sr. and Jay Van Andel of Amway.

The programs and opinions of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy have had carte blanche to hundreds of pages of local and regional news outlets, their videos, speakers bureau, publications (Capital Confidential, and anti-union Educational Journal sent to all of Michigan's public school teachers) has a wide sphere of influence. Slick brochures and brightly colored booklets promote a wide range of rational intended to promote and achieve their objectives. They have been successful beyond their wildest dreams; they have a complete control/homogeny over the political processes of Michigan.

MichiganVotes.org is Mackinac Center's tracking site on legislation. These business elites hold control over a supine Michigan State Supreme Court as the final rubber stamp/safeguard on their achievements.

Look at these examples of the interlocking roles of Michigan Corporations with the private political power machine that runs Michigan:

• Mackinac Donor: Chase Foundation = BLM Member: Sarah McClelland, President, Michigan Region/Chase Bank
• Mackinac Donor: Hanover Insurance Group Foundation =BLM Member: Frederick Eppinger, President and CEO, Hanover Insurance Group
• Mackinac Donor: Herbert and Grace Dow Foundation = BLM Member: Andrew Liveris, CEO, Dow Chemical
• Mackinac Donor: General Motors Foundation = BLM Member: Daniel Akerson, CEO/Chairman of the Board, General Motors
• Mackinac Donor: Jay and Betty Van Andel Institute = BLM Member: Steve Van Andel, Amway
• Mackinac Donors: Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation = BLM Member: Doug DeVos, Amway

The "Turnaround Plan for Michigan" produced by these principals and others included:

1. Reducing the compensation of state employees
2. Requiring state employees pay more for their health insurance...
3. Encouraging sharing of services between local governments
4. Eliminating binding arbitration for police officers and firefighter
5. Deregulating workplace safety standards
6. Reducing the Michigan Business Tax

This is only the tip of the iceberg of goals or targets included in the radical "reinvention" Snyder hid from the voters in his stealth campaign for governor in 2008.

What did the Holland Sentinel reveal of the nature of the BLM? Read the Holland Sentinel op-ed:

"One of the most influential civic groups that emerged in reaction to our state's tailspin last decade was Business Leaders for Michigan. Comprised of top executives at some of the state's largest companies (among them the locally based Haworth, Herman Miller and Perrigo), BLM took a broader outlook than most other business groups, issuing a wide-ranging Michigan Turnaround Plan in 2010, many elements of which were incorporated into Gov. Rick Snyder's agenda in 2011."

There are many, many other interlocking cronyisms in the engine powering the BLM/ALEC/Mackinac Center cabal:

"Because there's more apparent government tie-in to the BLM-and the Mackinac Policy Center-than just Rick Snyder's obvious channeling of their policies. John Nixon, the State Budget Director, has been a speaker at the BLM's Leadership Conference. So has William (Bill) Schuette... (Michigan's Attorney General) who also happens to be the Trustee of the Rollin M. Gerstaker Foundation-a major Mackinac Center contributor.

"Mark Murray, a BLM member and current president of Meijer, Inc., was formerly the Michigan State Treasurer, the Michigan State Budget Director, and the Director of the Department of Management and Budget."

"Andy Dillon, failed gubernatorial candidate, is "the former vice president of GE Capital and then president of Detroit Steel Company. As Speaker of the Michigan House, he endorsed the BLM turnaround plan. Now, he's Rick Snyder's State Treasurer."

"Doug Rothwell, (well identified cohort with John M. Engler’s long tenure) the current president and CEO of the Business Leaders for Michigan, was appointed in January by Rick Snyder to be Chairman of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. As Progress Michigan noted, "This gives BLM-a private organization-virtual control over an agency that makes decisions regarding tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and sets economic policy for the state."

(Emphasis Added)

These Princes of Corporate Prosperity Are Well-Rewarded for Their Activities
 
The combined income of the "81 members of BLM make $107.5 million a year in salary” (as of 2010), they are the elites that determine, as never before, the life and living conditions of Michigan's children, mentally ill, poor, labor, public employees and all others. Nothing escapes their ability to trump the vital interests of the Middle Class, they rule!

Residents of West Michigan will recognize a lot of these familiar names:

1.    Jim Hackett from Steelcase in office furniture,
2.    Richard Haworth from Haworth another furniture producer,
3.    Mark Bissell, the vacuum-cleaner king,
4.    Dan Gordon of Gordon Food Service, and
5.    Blake Krueger from Wolverine World Wide.

Rick Snyder's campaign outline (Snyder's 10 Point Plan) came directly from the previously published BLM objectives, who runs/controls whom?

If you are upset with the tremendous hit that Michigan families have taken in the last 10 years look to them, these powerful elites have the levers of power and decision-making. They rule, you can suffer.

Source: Quotes drawn from: The Kings of Michigan, from GRIID March 31, 2011.


On the Reader:
Watch US Rep. Dave Agema scaring the radical right and Teapublicans in Lansing concerning the "threat" of foreign Sharia Law, or read an article "Why Rep. Dave Agema wants to stop Sharia by banning 'foreign laws' in Michigan courts" or a little about mini-scandal surrounding a similar meeting in the City of Allegan.

Related Slates:
Nationally popular featured article "Rick Snyder & the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Corporatist “Disaster Capitalism” on the Prowl in Michigan" or more on ALEC and the BLM on the Gazette.

The Original Post was CENSORED and DELETED by the editorial staff at the Detroit News and Michigan View.

What the Frack Fellas? Morality and Michigan's Environment - Back When & Now Then

In response to recent hydro-fracking enabling legislation, ad campaigns and spin led by ALEC and Big Oil surrogates in the Midwest (Michigan & Ohio).

"To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."
- Theodore Roosevelt, in a Speech to Congress on December 3, 1907

"[Conservation] is the chief material question that confronts us, second only and second always to the great fundamental questions of morality."
- Theodore Roosevelt, Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, May 13-15, 1908

You Gotta Love Teddy: The Bull Moose Who Went to Bat
for America's Natural Treasures (Theodore Roosevelt National Achieves c.1910)

Memorial Day and its participants, those steadily declining visages of past conflicts like the Spanish-American War of Teddy's day to today's World War II veterans who have been hailed as the Greatest Generation, remind us all that a precious and hard won victory over oppression and an evil corporate-run government in the hands of foreign tyrants was secured by a stupendous act of redemption-not only for America, but the entire world.

One writer has lamented the deterioration of that honor, the tarnishing of heroic valor, the death of that victory, due to the excesses of the corporatist control of all levels of state and federal governance, the sorry state of affairs we now face:

"Back when people were actually almost "free" (immediately after WWII), when public education was not just another empty promise - and the trend in life was toward a better tomorrow for everyone - at that time 'control' was in retreat, and progress was the theme of every hour. Now what we have is control of every idiotic facet of everyday existence - rules for every waking act, every thought that is not controlled is seen as the enemy of the state (the corporatocracy).

"Our entire way of life has been stolen and shall never return to the lazy and hopeful days of living and loving, of joy and promise, with the possibility for doing real and meaningful things with one's own life - not to mention being able to envision a better world for more and more people - whose lives were so far below the levels we enjoyed.

" Instead of that promise, instead of that possibility - what we have now is the outright worship of Mistrust, of Fear, and of Paranoia - along with obscene profits for those who have purchased all the politicians, and who control every facet of this once nearly free society.

"If American life were a sporting event - today's game would be one in which all the officials and the referees had all been pre-purchased by what would obviously be the winning team. Now companies 'police' their own activities, deciding for themselves when they've gone too far - or stolen too much. The original point behind government providing a watchdog over industry - was to keep the playing fields equal - between players and owners."
(emphasis added)

The writer is on the right scent.

Take the following example from a Nation of Change article entitled "ALEC Slips Exxon Loophole into New Ohio Law":

"Wake up and smell the frack fluid. But don't ask what's in it, at least not in Ohio, cause it's still not your right to know. Ohio is in the final stages of making an Exxon trojan horse on hydrofracking into state law, and it appears that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) connected Exxon's lawyers with co-sponsors of Ohio Senate Bill 315: at least 33 of the 45 Ohio legislators who co-sponsored SB 315 are ALEC members, and language from portions of the state Senate bill is similar to ALEC's 'Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act.'...disclosure of fracking fluids? On behalf of ExxonMobil?

Frack fluids include unknown chemicals that gas drillers mix with sand and large amounts of water. The mixture is pumped underground at high pressure in order to retrieve gas and oil by fracturing shale formations. These are the chemicals that have caused widespread concern among residents near gas fracking operations; concerns echoed by doctors who don't know how to treat patients harmed by exposure to chemicals that oil companies keep secret. Oil companies like XTO Energy, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the first company lined up to drill in Ohio's Utica shale."

(emphasis added)

Milking Mother Michigan: Fracking (Shale Sands) Map
of the Lower 48 US States (US Energy Information Agency May 2011)

The blatant use of power and immense amounts of cold, secret cash to push aside the welfare and rightful concerns of the population in order to accomplish whatever is in the Corporatists' self-interest is best shown in the ongoing activity of the Koch Brothers cabal comprised chiefly of the Americans for Prosperity and The American Legislative Exchange Council.

It has become exposed and shown to the public that things so dastardly are being rammed through blindsided/defenseless state legislatures by A.L.E.C. members in those bodies, and ALEC's fellow travelers, that many premiere brands, former sponsors and supporters of ALEC, have bailed out of this corporate-owned and operated 'plug and play' Rad Right legislative mill.

What a blow to ALEC to have Walmart, Coke, Blue Cross and so many other familiar brands and corporations pull out of the Koch Bros. American Legislative Exchange Council. Yet here in Michigan A.L.E.C. powers on. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy joyfully and recently submitted in its own suggested boilerplate legislation, developed here in Michigan, to be promoted by ALEC nationwide.

US Rep. Dave Agema, a Michigan ALEC member and a Rad Right Screaming Eagle, succeeds, with the backing of the Koch's crowd, becoming Michigan's upstart male National Republican Committee member. Little wonder, when over 100 past or present members of the Michigan Legislature are /or have been complainant ALEC members.

Business Trumps Nature Leaving Just Stumps: When Michigan Big Business gets it all - Statewide Clear Cutting of Millions of Acres in the 1880-90's (Upper Peninsula Lumbering Operations Anon c.1880)

How do you suppose Michigan Koch-Heads will handle our fracking questions when the time comes to regulate (OR NOT) the fracking permits and permissions so intensely sought by Koch oil and other such interests? Last century rich investors left the face of Michigan a stubble of stumps, but the fact is nobody knows what toxic fluids flow through far flung fracking pumps.

Michigan families and their many out state guests have enjoyed its wealth of nature, pure beauty, fertile soils, and its bounty and plenty.

Who cares? We care!

Our state, with its tremendous water resources, must care; it's our wonderland heritage won and protected by heroes and workers, farmers and tradesmen, now so blatantly threatened by the overweening Corporatocracy and the greed of the rich and powerful 1%.

What the Frack? Will the Koch Brothers blast TDR off Mt Rushmore too?

On the Reader:

• Michigan grassroots movement website "Ban Michigan Fracking" and Michigan Petition Drive website "Let's Ban Fracking" 
• Key articles on Fracking in The World in "Burning water, contamination and natural gas 'fracking'" (16 May, 2011) and details about the relationship between ALEC and Heartland Institute in "Heartland Institute and ALEC Partner to Pollute Classroom Science" (March 30, 2012) and more MAPS on Oil Spills and Fracking Accidents across the country and in Michigan.
• Teddy Roosevelt and history of "Conservation as Morality" by Jessica Sheffield (January 2011)

Related Slates:
More of Teddy Roosevelt and ALEC in the Gazette.

Original.

Holy Tomatoes! Detroit News' Nolan Finley Plays Catchup

In response to Nolan Finley and those on the right attempting to spin the story that it's supposedly President Obama and Dems not the GOP that has been using 'social issues' to gin up votes.

Sez Brother Finley in "Obama milks social issues" (Obama gave Romney an implied snuggy) on May 11, 2012:

"Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney again took the bait, allowing himself to be drawn into this discussion. So again the campaigns are debating divisive social issues instead of fiscal policy. That plays to Obama's strategy of painting Romney as an extremist and avoiding having to answer for the economy."

Catch up to reality, Nolan. This is exactly what Republican Svengalis have been so artfully doing for decades; beginning under the nefarious tutelage of Newt "the genius" Gingrich or so he was labeled by friendlies until Newt crossed that thin red line and was tossed.

Rich Men Ride while the Rest of Us Run: Corporatocracy
and Income Inequality is THE current 'social issue'.

No one, no party, no group, no clique, no organized political faction does a better job milking the essence of divisive issue politics than the Republican Party; so weakened that the GOP can be taken over by the wealthy elites like the the Koch Brothers, the Club for Growth, various Christian Dominionists, religious and racial bigots, and radical militia elements (gun nuts) until the once sensible and civic-minded Grand Old Party is no more. Poof! Think Ike.

Let Ted Nugent go on wallowing in hate and incitement to mayhem; as evil as he is, he 's only a "scare'jim'crow" archetype of a certain redneck gnarl of lawless tyranny that smirks across the nation. Nugent's part of a cohort of wild and reckless men, dark alley troublemakers, civic hoodlums. And don't they love the trouble they incite... the attention they get!

For decades Newt Gingrich's distraction & negativatization of language made useful for undermining civil discourse has prevailed in the dark hearts of the "Hard Right," as former President Gerald R. Ford labeled them during the Pat & Bay Buchanan dominated 1992 GOP National Convention. It was at Houston where Pat Buchanan declared religious and cultural war on the nation. As a direct result George H. W. Bush, the standing president, high right off the First Gulf War 100 hour victory, when down to stunning defeat to William Jefferson Clinton.

From "Ford tells Gingrich He'd Better Tone It Down" by AP reporter Lawrence L. Knutson:

Ford believed Gingrich should leave "partisan attacks" to others. "One thing that speakers have to understand is that the speaker is speaker for the House. You have to keep that high-level attitude and let the partisan attacks come from your majority leader.... The Speaker (Gingrich) is better advised to stand back." Ford went on to say that looking at the wider future, he believes that if the "extreme-right" partisans within the GOP control the party's policies and dictate who is the candidate... "the party will lose at the polls."

Note: This account also appeared in the Grand Rapids Press, June 2, 1998 and is still spot-on for the 2012 election cycle.

Social Issues Aside: Our National Troubles & the Great Bush Recession Have Created Vast New Opportunities for Unscrupulous Business Opportunists & Scammers

The aggressive CORPORATOCRACY (see the expanded definition from Wiki below) had better get out their act together and begin to restore the rule of law in financial and banking affairs. So far they haven't. The plague created by Citizens United will make this a very reprehensible election season; bar none.

Corporatists were quick to sense an opening, an "opportunity" and they seized it. They have profited immensely from the great disturbance in the economy brought on by the buffoonery of George W. Bush, the Lesser. (The man no Republican can bring themselves to mention in favorable light.) The Bush TARP and the bailouts have put stunning amounts of cash in the coffers of bankseters and Wall Street schemers and shysters'; amounts so large and so excessive as to be incomprehensible in light of in historic perspective. Are we angry? You bet we are!

War profiteering has egregiously enlarged the holdings/coffers of Dick Cheney and Neo-Con Cronies.

Things are still in need of repair and restitution.

Corporatocracy for Idiots

"A corporatocracy is a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power. In a corporatocracy an elite upper-class, maintains ties between business and government, sometimes by lobbying efforts or funding political advertising campaigns, or providing bailouts when corporations are seen as too big to fail, for the purpose of controlling government and dictating policy to serve its financial interests.

"A corporatocracy is viewed as anti-democratic or opposed to democracy or used to describe situations in which democracy has been manipulated negatively, sometimes resulting in a passive citizenry and subservient media.

"A corporatocracy represents what some see as economic exploitation, and the concept has been used to explain bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs, as well as generalized complaints such as the plundering of national treasuries, people, and natural resources. The concept has also been used by critics of globalization, sometimes in conjunction with criticism of the World Bank or unfair lending practices, as well as criticism of free trade agreements which, according to these claims, move high-paying jobs overseas.

"The term corporatocracy is a negative term, likened pejoratively to cancer, fascism, and Orwellianism, perhaps because, according to this view, business-government ties are seen as secretive, lacking transparency and accountability. The elite engaging in corporatocracy is sometimes termed the 1 percent."

Source: Corporatocracy on Wiki (Be sure to click on all the footnotes to this piece. Go from ignorant to informed.)

So Nolan, fearless thought leader, it's time you play catch-up. Pocket your rotten tomatoes, stop our carping, and do something substantive, pro-active about saving Michigan and America. You can begin by restraining yourself from "milking social issues" and move toward a sound economy and a restructuring of taxes so as to save Michissippi's middle class. Put aside your poison pen, and take up your Habitat for Humanity hammer, rise early, move out to save the day for a family in need. It would be a start.

Dump the tomatoes. Catch-up Finley, catch-up!

On the Reader:
List of Responses to Nolan Finley on the Gazette (Topic DATE):

• High up in Jim Crow’s Nest: Constant Cawing Incites Civic Upheaval by the Detroit News - Michigan View (General Idiocy and use of Racial Undertones February 2012)
• Nolan Finley: Maniacal Warmonger? (General Idiocy and Violence September 2011)
• Dead End/Bad Trade Off: Profitazation or Abandonment of Detroit’s Public School Children (Education June 2011)
• No National Honor Given Finley: Taking Down Detroit’s Public Schools is a Civic Crime (Education May 2011)
• Snyder, the Socialist, Takes on Local Democracy Calling it a "Status Quo" That Needs to Be Radically Re-invented.(Ideology April 2004)
• Honest Abel “AWOL” in Michigan just as in Wisconsin (Ideology March 2011)
• A one nostril false grunt from Nolan: It’s not my pigs that stink (Ideology June 2011)
• The Detroit News is "Tapped Out" (Taxes and Ideology February 2011)
• Nolan Finley Rocks Local Detroit High School With His Decision to Teach English to Sophomores (Education December 2009)
• Raw Revenge Raises Its Ugly Head (Education December 2009)
• An Additional Dollar a Day... (State Budget and Ideology November 2009)
• The only place a teacher gets a fair shake in the Detroit News is on its obituary page (Education June 2009) 
• Finley's Right Wing anti-teacher Crusade: A man with a forked tongue and a flaying pen (Education October 2009)

Related Slates:
More on Corporatocracy and the Republican Party on the Gazette.


Original.

Rick Snyder & the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Corporatist “Disaster Capitalism” on the Prowl in Michigan

Behold the Nerd Snyder's brass knuckled attacks on public education and local democracy; they are more brazen and destructive than former Gov. Engler's legendary ham-fisted assaults. Über-Ugly is on the rise, again.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is utilizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) crib notes, a recall offense. The “Nerd” Governor can't make a move without employing ALEC models & policies and support from Michigan’s long history with ALEC and a long list of ALEC members.

Foremost in his attacks is his beefed up Emergency Manager Law and Emergency Managers in Michigan (EM) through Michigan Republican sponsored (led by the EM controlled Benton Harbor's own Phil Pavlov who championed the bill) EM dictatorial powers given Snyder appointed one-man rule set against the rights of local government under Michigan's long revered and respected "local control".

Also, TeaPublican Snyder continues to lead systemic Republican attacks on teachers and public schools (in all categories) and aggressively seeks to take down the very foundations of Michigan Public Education (rules, operations and imposition of privatization).

Lastly many, many areas of Michigan’s laws, rules and regulations are being “adjusted” at a furious pace to fit the whims of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (spin-off of the national arch-conservative Heritage Foundation), and Americans for Prosperity (AFP) - heavily backed by the Koch Bros. and mega-wealthy families like Michigan's own DeVos & Van Andel clans.

It’s a virtual, spiral corporate feeding frenzy!

Corporate Coups d'état: How ALEC is creating Corporatocracy
across the Nation state-by-state, bill-by-bill, Legislator-by-Legislator

Michigan has become an infamous "Mean TeaPublican" Battleground State

Scott Hagerstrom, the Director of the Koch-funded Michigan Americans for Prosperity (AFP) makes it clear, that it is the Kochs, working directly through ALEC, that have provided the AFP plans to the Michigan Tea Party, to eliminate all organized resistance from the political sphere, and as Scott says, they are aiming to "take the unions out at the knees." This belligerence started in Wisconsin and now it's spreading across the country.

Snyder and crew have sought to make their attacks “below the radar” using methods that accomplish virtually the same things Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker (attempting to raise money in Michigan to fight his recall) has attempted, but doing so in a backhanded way.  Walker’s M.O. has been replacement legislation, Snyder has used "substitution" and "amendments" to settled legislation to accomplish his “re-invention.”

Snyder's in a world of trouble. Snyder's causing the kids of this state, our kids, to go into panic. Their schools, bus transportation, art & music, sports programs, band and field trips, advanced placement classes and/or ability to take a class at a near by college or university (while still in high school) - all this and more, much more is on the cutting table.

The concepts that are the core of the Snyder program (to reinvent by destroying what we have, to rebuild in the mode Rick dictates) use the metrics and formulas of ALEC as found in its fabricated playbook of data and theories in “Rich States, Poor States”.

The American Legislative Executive Council is a heretofore unknown far right, Koch Bros. et. al. think tank - controlled and funded by major corporations which have found a way to force feed the various state legislative bodies with legislation and resolutions championing and directly benefiting their specific needs.

The following is a partial list of ALEC's other corporate backers, those we know of, from Wikipedia:

• Amway
• American Nuclear Energy Council
• American Petroleum Institute
• Coors Brewing Company
• Exxon Mobil
• The National Rifle Association
• Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America
• Philip Morris
• R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
• Texaco
• VISA
• and others.

Groups critical of ALEC claim that the organization is controlled by the entities that fund it’s operations and confabs, subsequently promote these donors' agendas and goals, along with making carefully crafted attempts to advance legislation which favor and advantage their interests.

The American Legislative Exchange Council is a political/ideological powerhouse, second to none. It calls corporate-serving shots nationwide. Most recently the power of ALEC has been laid bare in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, although ALEC subterfuge and "mainlining" of "just-fill-in-the-blanks" corporate written and approve legislation for states has been brought to the public's attention.

Little attention has been paid up until now as to the key early members were, those who set the tone and greased the skids for what has come to follow.

More than 30 years ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision:

“A nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C.”

At that meeting, in September 1973, state legislators, including:

• then Illinois State Rep. Henry Hyde,
• conservative activist Paul Weyrich, leader of the New Traditionalist movement
• Lou Barnett, a veteran of then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign

“(These men) together with a handful of others, launched the American Legislative Exchange Council.”

Among those who were involved with ALEC in its formative years were:

• Robert Kasten and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin
• John Engler of Michigan
• Terry Branstad of Iowa
• John Kasich of Ohio

“(A)ll of whom moved on to become governors or members of Congress.”

Congressional members who were active during this same period included:

• Senators John Buckley of New York,
• Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and
• Congressmen Phil Crane of Illinois
• Jack Kemp of New York.

Source: The American Legislative Exchange Council’s home site in “About ALEC”.

Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about the power and thrust of the Far Right, or what Grand Rapids native former President Jerry Ford called the “Hard Right,” knows the power, impact and influence the above mentioned group of “reactionaries and revolutionaries” on the outer fringe of radical conservatism have had.  Observers also know the great and course-changing impact these men had, and continue to have, on today’s governance.

ALEC's activities are very widespread and endemic to the lawmaking processes of state legislatures across the country, and for that reason, their activities have been accepted through ignorance of the secret and underlying purposes and objectives they promote.  The public finds it hard to believe such a group exists. But they do. Consider: "ALEC has approximately 2,000 legislative members representing all 50 states, as well as more than 85 members of Congress and 14 sitting or former Governors who are considered 'ALEC alumni'" (Source: Wikipedia, CMD and VLTP who has reported on ALEC in most levels of US Courts as well).

The ALEC Koch Trade in Michigan
Thus, as Snyder attempts to roll out his jaundiced version of what's good for your child in Michigan's public schools it is only fair that we accelerate  the process of ferreting out who's underwriting these "re-inventive" concepts and in coughing up the statistics of the kind that Snyder uses to make his full-frontal, brutal raid on our neighborhood schools.

If you love outsiders dictating to Michigan (who, what, when and where about your child or grandchild's education) you will want to follow the revelations coming about Snyder's the sources behind Rick's snide attacks on schools and the teachers who teach.

As ALEC purposefully puts Michigan schools in the worst light possible, Snyder accepts that flawed data. His response, "It's a fact." No, governor, it's as filtered and reported by ALEC and staff doing the insidious work of the anti-public schools crowd.

The 2008 ALEC Education Report barked our Michigan public schools, placing them at the near bottom with the right-to-work paradises, the Gulf states, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. These are states with significant minority student populations. ALEC reports highlights states on the boarder with/or closer to Canada to the north: Minnesota, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Montana, where minority students are far less concentrated; these states are ranked highest. No genus is needed to find an important factor in those findings.

ALEC employed ideological bully William Bennett to head up its annual education report.  (He's the harsh critic of public education, whom Reagan put into the Carter established Department of Education to obfuscate and destroy as much as possible of this far right-hated federal cabinet post). Bennett also runs a for-profit business. K-12 Inc is Bennett's idea of what he would like to do to profit from public education, especially through the means of privatizing as much of its functions as possible. Bennett covets a major economic windfall from the potential passage of Snyder’s radical "Cyber Schools" legislation (through his stake in K-12 Inc.) being interjected into Michigan’s education system.

K-12 Inc. also has had among its shareholders those well-known parochiaid/voucher mavens, Dick & Betsy DeVos.

See also: “The Truth About Cyber Schools” on Blogging for Michigan January 23, 2012 and long history of ALEC and Right-Wing orgs like Heritage involvement in education - “School Choice”, Charter Schools and Public School Privatization.

Michigan Pieces in Place: Snyder as the Pawn of the Kingpin
Koch Bros, Scaife, Olin and DeVos Family ALEC  Corporatocracy

Snyder's vision, informed and directed by The American Legislative Exchange Council and the Wealthy Elite, is another brazened attempt at an radical right-wing coup in Michigan, the same one all Americans are facing across the Nation. 

It isn't the re-invention ideal as Snyder proclaims: it's retro-pursuit of the long-standing disenfranchising goals designed to destroy America's great institution, free public education. In this process the harsh critics have found a willing pawn in Snyder. Combine this too, with the creation Snyder's Jim Crow EM Plantations in multiple Michigan cities, the latest target being Detroit, and the destruction of basic principals of democracy, representation of elected officials, perhaps the pawn, is really "castling" all Michiganders, king to rook.

ALEC's long march goes on, as the public will see
For the DeVos’ and in particular Betsy DeVos, the Koch Brothers (backers and funders of ALEC) and the mom & pop family-business-killers-the Waltons of Wal-Mart - public education is a target of great opportunity for quick profit and power lust.

The next major attack is already underway; again funded and cheered on by Betsy DeVos. It's her dismemberment and undermining of public universities and colleges.

Who would believe anyone, much less today’s radicalized Republicans, would literally stoop so low as to turn government and the taxpayers against our local schools so much a part of our state like in Ovid, White Pine, Monroe and Alpena, communities where and kids matter so much.  Republicans cannot hate teachers and professors and at the same time hold a dishonest honest claim to care about students.

The Michigan TeaPartisan's (Michigan Tea Party Republicans) radical and aggressive punishment attacks on educators are a clear indication of a very low-class mentality, festooned with haranguing diatribes, and the extremely rude conduct on the part of select TeaPartisans during education hearings in Michigan's legislature; all centered on crashing down on education and educators. Such is the sorriest of sights.

Snyder's ALEC centered education plan is a tragic loss - loss for Michigan's kids. And a tragic loss for taxpayers supporting neighborhood public schools. Killing local option and local government via the dictatorial EM regime is just plain evil and unacceptable.

Suppressing the right to vote and taking away the power of elected officials in units confiscated by Snyder can only be described as totalitarian in spirit.

The public must step up and fight back.  Not tomorrow, Today!

On the Reader:
Read a detailed SERIES on Betsy DeVos organizations attacking Public Education across the county by Rachel Tabachnick:
Part One: Voucher Advocate Betsy DeVos, Right-Wing Think Tanks Behind Koch-Style Attack on Public Schools 
Part Two: Pro-Voucher Astroturfing:  Campaigns Across Nation Coordinated by DeVos, Funded by a Few Mega-Donors 
Part Three: Betsy DeVos Announces PA Governor Tom Corbett Will Keynote Pro-Voucher National Policy Summit

Further reading on the American Legislative Exchange Council:
Investigate more about ALEC and read ALEC model legislation on the ALECexposed.org portal.
Read a Report on ALEC connections to Congress and the Federal Courts.
Read a early series of articles on ALEC in the Nation.
See how many ALEC bills and laws in US States identified so far.
Read a list of US and Multinational ALEC Corporate Members identified.
See what ALEC investigators and researchers have uncovered in State Reports on ALEC:
Arizona (Supplement) - Maine - Missouri - Michigan - New Hampshire - New Jersey - Ohio - Pennsylvania - Texas - Utah - Virginia - Wisconsin or find more information on your State.

Related Slates:
First piece focused on ALEC Disaster Capitalism on the Gazette:
Rick’s Re-Invention: A.L.E.C.’S Corporatist “Disaster Capitalism” on the Rise (April 2011)
Piece on Betsy Devos, ALEC and Education on the Gazette:
Betsy DeVos & The Amway Clan’s Abject Failure to Reach High Moral Ground via “Corporate Social Responsibility” (December 2011)

Best of ALEC posts on the American Legislative Exchange Council on the Gazette:
No Brainer Legislation & No Brain Legislators who slavishly deliver for the Corporatocracy (via ALEC) inside Michigan’s Legislature (July 2011)
Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C. (September 2011)
Smart A.L.E.C. in the Michigan: The secret is There is No Secret… But Oh Yes, There Is! (July 2011)
Who needs the Koch Brothers? We’ve Got Rick Snyder, ALEC and his “Buffo” Team of Privatizers! (July 2011)
Michigan ALEC State Chair Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker: A Cheery Face & A Fake Defense  promoting corporatist direct access to Michigan lawmaking (August 2011)

More on the American Legislative Exchange Council (tag) and the Emergency Management issue series in EM Plantation/Jim Crow on the Gazette.

Hillsdale's Gary Wolfram Elevates Andrew Breitbart - Dean of Defamation - to "Sainthood"

Response to Prof Gary Wolfram on the Detroit / Mackinac News Michigan View in "Ludwig von Breitbart" on March 13, 2012.

Hillsdale’s Dr. Gary must be high on chalk dust. Wolfram's eulogy for Andrew Breitbart was a cold rehash of his idol Ludwig pulled-reflexively from the prof's dusty achieves and yellowing scrapbooks. What exactly connected political hit-man and truth twister Andy Breitbart in Wolfram’s thinking with Dr. Gary's hero Ludwig von Mises?

It must have been a severe allergic reaction to accumulated chalk dust in Wolfram's stuffy cubical at the Rad Right's faint mockup of  a “Harvard”, Hillsdale College, a member of the Poison Ivy League.

Hillsdale College: Leaning right since right-wing Free Marketeers forced
the exit of the founding Free Baptists (Hillsdale Historical Society Archive)

Locked away from everyday reality, Professor Wolfram dwells at this quaint institutional anachronism, hidden away in a small bucolic southeastern Michigan town.

Hillsdale College is more an archetype of civic collapse and failure, retro-progression in quest of a giant need to be noticed in its attempts to pander to the greed of national and international corporatocracy, rather than be a crystalline beacon of higher culture.

Hillsdale exists, in large part, to supply the Too Far Right with pliant foot soldiers such as the murderous mercenary, billionaire scion- Eric Prince of Blackwater infamy.

A liberal arts education seeks to instill a higher sense of history and philosophy into a continuum and expansion of understanding about eternal truth and to build upon the vast achievements and ideals of the progressive human race propelled by the Enlightenment and an ongoing rediscovery of the classic cultures of yore as woven into the march of religion, philosophy, science and human understanding.

Why perseverate? Why ramble on about "liberalism" defined in the enlightenment era as 'the importance of individual liberty and limited government' when what is being espoused at Hillsdale is regression and suppression of modernity and the 'maturing understanding' of the needs and abilities of science and human inventiveness via strangling government?

For chalk dusty Prof. Gary, Breitbart "was an inspiration to those who agree with Mises that 'the ultimate and most profound of the fundamental insights of liberal thought is that it is ideas that constitute the foundation on which the whole edifice of human social cooperation is constructed and sustained and that a lasting social structure cannot be built on the basis of false and mistaken ideas.' “ From this we may try to follow Dr. Gary into believing that Andrew Breitbart was the paragon of TRUTH and ACCURACY.

Here is where Breitbart's notoriety as a crusader in Wolfram’s mind and von Mises' liberalism is seen as versus or against "anti-liberalism," (by which Prof. Gary derides the 21st Century "Liberals"-meaning Democrats and Progressives) and thus becomes lost in that stale cloud of professorial chalk dust.

While Wolfram is perfectly at home seeing himself as a "Classic" Liberal, and not a 21st Century Democrat/Progressive [Boo Hiss] Liberal; the man-on-the-street cannot make the jump Prof. Gary demands. Liberal must always, only mean Democrats.

Prof. Gary Elevates Fellow Traveler, Andrew Breitbart - Dean of Defamation - to Wolfarm’s Constellation of All-Time Ideological ‘Saints’- How Quixotic!

Not to be defeated, Prof. Gary bravely soldiers on. Gary, obviously at grievous personal loss over the death of his grenade-throwing Too Far Right Radical brother, Breitbart) describes his ideological troublemaker and soul-mate as a man labeled by many as "an enemy of the people."  Breitbart earned that exact description by virtue of his relentless partisanship and determination to spin, distort, twist, and invent Breitbart "truth" to fit radical ideology-in the service of the moneyed masters of a growing fascist Corporatocracy.

Andy Breitbart: Lived Large in a Conservative Tub of Small Minds
(TIME posted Bryce Duffy Photo on Brietbart's 'BagNews' 2010)

Breitbart, A Hero to Classic Liberalism? Hardly.
"Governments must be forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people, claimed von Mises,” proclaims Prof. Gary, emitting a temporary democratic high tone. Then Wolfram goes on to list the areas where Breitbart bent the truth and altered facts to defend a true and genuine anti-classic liberalism-TeaPartisanship given to bottom feeding, dissimulation, and ideological subterfuge he leaves the path of credibility and public trust.

Perez Zagorin, a noted American historian in "The historical significance of lying and dissimilation - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception" (1996):

"...Since the appearance in 1978 of Sissela Bok's important and widely noticed book, Lying. Moral Choice in Private and Public Life, the concern with lying and deception has continually increased. Bok's work was actuated by worry over declining standards of truth-telling and for this reason apparently touched a nerve. It coincided with the growing skepticism and mistrust felt among Americans and in other western nations about the veracity of governments, officials, and politicians, as well as lawyers, the medical profession, and business corporations."

Just prior to Breitbart's demise, in Troy, Michigan  Michigan Tea Party Republicans (under the spell of and paid & played by the Koch Bros' Americans for Prosperity) hosted one of Breitbart's very last public appearances, shared by Wolfram. This event was at a Koch Brothers pay-to-play sponsored event for Goldman Sach's operative, Mitt Romney, who regaled the Troy/Koch-ish Tea Party elements with his pledges to be one of them.

On the dais was a co-conspirator with Brietbart, Michelle Malkin - a virtual vestal virgin of poisonous venom - in the pursuit of penultimate Rovian truth, skewed to serve FOX's Too Far Right Wingers and corporatist fat cats.

What did the late Breitbart and Malkin bring to the Troy Tea Party Gathering according to Detroit News' Hank Payne?  From his article "Payne in Troy: Tea Party Mitt" February 26, 2012:

"...perhaps most striking was Mitt Romney's extraordinarily detailed, right-wing message perhaps most striking was Romney's extraordinarily detailed, right-wing message specifically tailored for the grassroots conservatives assembled by Americans for Prosperity and warmed up by red meat pundits Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart.”  

This lusty interpretation of the work of Breitbart is shared by non-other-than Sarah Palin:

"With the death of Breitbart, the conservative movement didn't just lose a General " we lost an entire Special Forces Division....But he didn't leave us without the tools and the knowledge we need to fight."

GOT THAT: Brietbart is lauded by Palin as a 'special forces' political/ideological, a high powered hit-man. A deceitful/unprincipled wonk-cum-celebrity in the hunt to bring down America's first Black president.

Is this the “classic liberalism” package that Dr.Gary presents to his nascent ideological apprentice warrior-types in laid back Hillsdale's Rad Right bootcamp?

Bottomline: The Wolfram veneration of Breitbart fails the high ethics and moral high ground test so vaunted by Hillsdale's über-moralizers. The following quote excerpted out of a synopsis in "Andrew Breitbart Dead: Conservative Blogger Dies Suddenly At 43", posted by Huffington Post:

1. "Republican gay rights group GOProud, of which Breitbart was a board member until recently, released a statement saying it was 'stunned and saddened,' and calling him an 'amazing friend and ally.'"
   
2. "Breitbart seldom showed restraint in his vitriol to his critics and seemed to relish in the negative attention his antics earned him. After Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, Breitbart tweeted, 'Rest in Chappaquiddick' and called him 'a special pile of human excrement.' When critics questioned (Breitbart's) tone, he tweeted they 'missed my best ones!'"
   
3. "Breitbart sponsored hidden camera, gottcha attacks on ACORN. Racial in nature, this tactic resulted in a firestorm of criticism. [The embarrassment it engendered stoked up such fierce partisan rants as were heard here in Michigan shrilly mouthed by former State Senator Michelle McManus while running for Michigan Secretary of State.] The edited Breitbart video featured 'some ACORN employees appearing willing to support illegal schemes involving tax advice, misuse of public funds and illegal trafficking in children.' Ultimately the Government Accountability Office cleared ACORN of criminal activities. None-the-less "public pressure led Congress to block previously approved funds from going to ACORN and to stop future payments. Roughly 10 percent of ACORN's funds came from federal grants and the group eventually disbanded."

Just another of Breitbart's tactical 'special forces' successes against Blacks and Obama? Of course.

Carry on Prof. Gary, elevate Brietbart and thereby lower the national bar for truth and civility. How "ill-liberal" in an anti-von Mises pro-Breitbart declination can Wolfram be?

On the Reader:
Read the Detroit / Mackinac News / Michigan View's "All Star" review of Brietbart's 'legacy' including the canonization by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter:

"There was no stopping Andrew Breitbart from fighting the good fight with every fiber of his soul. Good bye and God bless, Brother Andrew. You are loved and mourned and ever remembered."

Related Slates:
"Michigan View's Gary Wolfram Resurrects 18th Cent. Racial Bigotry in His Vision of Economic “Freedom” (ala Adam Smith)" - "Prof. Gary Wolfram of the Michigan View Let’s His Little Light Shine On Greed" - "Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C."

More responses to Gary Wolfram and other on the Michigan View on the Gazette.

Original.

Detroit: Behemoth 'Motor City' Whale Fights for Its Life as Snyder's EM & Scavengers Circle

As the sea of concern and support is siphoned away by Grover Norquist & the Michissippian TeaPublican  militant minions (Michigan Tea Party Republican) made up of many of Michigan's ideological scavengers, the large and once awesome form of the 'whale' metaphorically called the "Motor City Behemoth" becomes clearly visible: gasping for air, suffering in its darkest hour, it's thick hide filled with scars, spears, broken harpoons with long and tangled lines, and wounds to defy description.

Detroit Public Assets: Stripping and Scavenging anything and everything of Value
(16th Cent. Woodcut Royal Maritime Museum)

The Behemoth ‘Motor City’ Whale Fights for Its Life in Grover Norquist’s Drained & Drying ‘No Tax’ Clawfoot Tub

Deprived of the ocean of support it needed to prosper and survive, the 'whale' has been purposefully, more and more cut-off from normal human concern. Dry-docked by years of political neglect and blame-speaking by Too Far Right Republicans from out-state and confined by the noose of competing suburban elites, the gigantic 'whale' is now being carved up. Its great hulk is crushed by predators and scavengers, desecrated and purposefully neglected by a strong and very angry, repriseful,  TeaPartisan led lock-stepped Michigan's state government--all four branches of which have chosen to let it die, as it were.

The growing stench is unbearable and Oh! the inhumanity of it all.

Republican Leadership Sees Advantage in Detroit City's Economic Implosion & Seeks to Lay the Blame on the role of Government and Democrats

Here's how Saul Anuzis seeks to dole out blame for the downfall of Detroit City. Unwilling to make his own personal statement of fact, Anuzis did so by forwarding to Republicans statewide this generic piece from a third source titled “Detroit Nears Bankruptcy.“:

"It's hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause."

“Obviously the problem is that we haven't spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven't written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven't published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven't extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well." 

Source: "Detroit Nears Bankruptcy" in The American Interest, March 11, 2012.

So the downfall of the city falls on its current residents, both in Anuzis' ideological mindset and in terms of affected Detroiters, with an  inability to buck the system and rise above the withdrawal of elite support or to obtain  further financial commitment. Thus the crisis will be framed by harsh critics in terms of today's challenges. All relevant references to the lead-up, decades of systemic abandonment and Jim Crow shortcomings, will be dismissed as 'old history' or irrelevant. But such is NOT THE CASE.

The failure seen today is long-term failure, deliberate neglect, which has inhabited wrongful decisions made time and again by the powerful, not by the state’s  poor or the victims of cruel conservatism.  A working faction of opinion leaders and corporatists have for years opposed and undermined an effective collaboration and bi-partisan responsibility for such root causes of the great Detroit failures of industry, banking, real estate, religion, or state partisan politics.  As they allowed the core city Detroit to be undermined and eroded of its viability, things escalated to this danger point, made much worse by the G.W. Bush Great Recession. Yes, we may include the majority minority citizens, those who now dwell in the shell-shocked remnants of a once great and thriving city of commerce, the arts, and industry.  They do have a more minor role, but out of the negativity, unemployment, years of assistance and Jim Crow they were and are divided and confined to powerlessness. They have no status to pull the levers of intervention and lack the ability to tap the resources of investment and renewal other than their vote and personal efforts in community or houses of worship--wherever support can be gathered.

Just How Did Detroit's Supporting Tide Recede? It took years and in involved the deliberate abandonment of Detroit by key elements:

• The need for manual labor, as during the auto boom years and the great wars, receded. Automation and foreign competition for superior product and the ravishes of overseas outsourcing have taken down the tide that floats us all in Michigan's world of automaking. One important and outstanding impact of the loss of auto related jobs is the loss of these well-paid jobs to men and women of color!
• Businesses have fled the core city. Hudson's fled downtown in a final shoppers' collapse. GM retreated from its historic former headquarters to the more moated and in-crenelated waterfront - the former the Renaissance Center complex.
• Urban grocery stores are now limited-service, often over-priced. Fresh fruits and vegetables are in limited, or non-existent supply.
• Black and minority children are relegated to neglect and abandonment by a complex list of social and spiritual maladies.
• The lack of adequate transportation for people confined to an urban area without personal transportation is daunting and a virtual impediment to jobs and getting to and from jobs on time.
• The core of remaining corporations and heavy-hitter investors has marched retreat. Business Leaders for Michigan has gathered the shards of the former Detroit Renaissance into a very aggressive posture:  “We want the power and we are prepared to use state government to get that power and financial, physical control. There are assets we will take or remove from urban Detroit via our support and full participation in PA #4, the Emergency Manager scheme.” Two leading and important A list corporations illustrate the BLM's own internal instability: the exit of both Comerica and American Axle from Detroit.  And the B list is long.
• Religious and sectarian forces  focused for decades around Dick & Betsy DeVos and the American Federation for Children have moved against the Public Schools of Detroit. Dozens of neighborhood schools are closed and gone. A wildfire crop of for-our-own-profit private charters paid with public tax dollars has been franchised by the TeaPublican 2011 super majority and the take down of 'government' schools is moving ahead unabated. Hundreds of career minority teachers are gone.
• The Roman Catholic Diocese of Detroit has over the last decades slammed shut dozens of parish/neighborhood churches. Some of the many thousands of abandoned dwellings and structures which house crack dens and child rapists are properties the Church owns or controls.
• Republicans and Corportists' ham-fisted desire to achieve homogeneity over unions, especially public service unions, has led to a litany of anti-union legislative grab-backs, health care limitations, retirement reductions, tax on public sector pensioners, and all manner of other devices such as dues control, and other on-going legislative intimidation.
• Suburban/Urban political and governmental infighting rages on.
• The withdrawal of Michigan State Police from the urban freeways will become retrogressive and threatening.
• The Black Middle Class flight from Detroit is a strong tell-tell of the growing disillusionment of successful minorities in regard to a productive and sustainable quality of life in urban Detroit.
• The level of social and familial problems in the core city, while it actually mirrors the kinds of problems or concerns of the nation's entire population (e.g. unwed mothers, many juveniles themselves) would appear to undercut future enculturation and success for those locked in this urban ghetto.
• Drug use is rampant. The failure to stem the highly successful pipeline of drugs from origin to destination on Detroit's city streets, while alarming and sinister, with its many criminal off-shoots, does not take from the drug culture the fact that even larger numbers of white Americans are customers than are Blacks for these illegal substances.
• The number of felons arising out of Detroit's morass (unemployment, early drop-outs, drugs, and vagrancy)  bode horribly for its future. With unemployment in or near the mid-twenty percent range for these many youths, what can be the possibilities for them? Even if they serve their time, when released they're felons and are negatively 'marked for life,' frozen out of good pay jobs.
• The cut-off of revenue sharing from Lansing [around $4 BILLION cut from Detroit and other municipalities by Michigan’s legislature 2001-2010], while at the same time billions of taxpayer dollars are currently being poured into commercial coffers is part of a deliberate business 'bailout' system.
• Plus the clever political chicanery designed to present an appearance that Michissippian TeaPublicans are not Wisconsin Walkerites, while forcing governmental units to face EM management and throw out contracts,  belies TeaPublicans are disassembling Collective Bargaining by a insidious, forced mechanism.

The Truth is out. 

Central planners in the pro-business cabal of Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Michigan Insurance Lobbyists, The Business Leaders for Michigan, the National Heritage Foundation’s  spin-off-The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (Between 2002 and 2009, the Mackinac Center's donors included the Charles G. Koch Foundation with $69,151), and rogue elements best identified as anti-public schools/anti-unions Amway Corporation and Americans for Prosperity/Koch Bros.  whose out-state contributions funneled through the 2010 Snyder Campaign $900K] have chosen to make the historic downturn under the G.W.B. Great Recession  their moment to utilize economic emergency turning it into prized 'opportunity' for achieving long-sought goals via Disaster Capitalism.

The advent of the Emergency Manager-style fascism is especially onerous. Such subterfuge and dictatorial power, in the hands of a Corporatocracy and band of highly-skilled and ruthless corporate law and accounting firms,  means drastic, undemocratic cancer will ravish our state's governmental units--all in a blatant and ideological attempt to achieve a long lasting homogeneity over liberalism and Democrats and groups, such as unions, with political abilities and powers.

-----

And then there is this: a haunting and threatening history of extreme racism related to the history of Detroit. Former Appeals Court Judge, the late Glenn Allen put it on point.  To Wall Street the shadow of Detroit is  a metropolis with a strong history, of a "low threshold" for Jim Crow, racial unrest, and violence. That fact is never 'out of mind' with investors.

“Judge Allen "was a paragon of public service and personal integrity," said Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Maura D. Corrigan upon hearing of his passing. Glenn Allen had served, among many other things, as Special Counsel for Legal, Fiscal and Legislative Affairs under Bill Milliken from 1971-74.

FINAL OBSERVATION:  Responding to crisis with "The Ghost Mayor,"  March 17, 2012,  Charlie LeDuff, Pulitzer Prize Winner, has sounded a clear alarm: Given the possibility that the validation of the anti-PA 4 Petition Drive suspends the EM operations until November's election, Gov. Rick Snyder's options are narrowed. "The governor might then use the only stick left in his bag. Let the city drown. According to LeDuff:

"Already vendors and contractors are not getting paid and the city will run out of cash in a month. That means cops,  paramedics and tax collectors won't get paid. Ambulances won't get fixed. Parks won't open.

Under that scenario, you can expect a long, hot, bloody summer." 
(emphasis added)

LISTEN UP ALL PARTIES: Financially taking down Detroit City is not ultimately about political winners and losers; it's about a city with hundreds of thousands of men, women, boys and girls and what is to become of their welfare.

What is done, the spirit with which it is done, and the potential of suspending and abandoning the provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the Voter Rights Act if Detroit is not financially made solvent for its necessary operations beyond April, will have far greater and more crippling, far-reaching negative impacts than this state and its present governmental mindset can bear or handle.

What then?  Game over?

Related Slate: "Michigan GOP's Power Grab Thievery: Patterson's 30 Year Jim Crow / EM Plot to Steal Detroit's Royal Jewels & Liquid Assets"

More on Detroit and Emergency Management on the Gazette.

Original.

Snyder’s Michissippi (Michigan) Revival of 21st Cent ‘Jim Crow’: Imposing ‘EM Plantations’ Across the State & Nation

Pushed by elite big money controllers (Business Leaders for Michigan (BLM) & Mackinac Center for Public Policy), Rick Snyder's inventing 21st Century Jim Crow. Snyder has acted with vigorous, uncompromising and a self-aggrandizing false flag - "Relentless Positive Action"; utilizing the powerful punch of angry and irrational citizens-calling themselves "patriots." These malcontents sent to the state legislature are Know Nothing hotheads with a very narrow and targeted un-civic, anti-democratic agenda which is destroying Michigan as we once knew it.

Snyder is leading a precedent-breaking rampage of 'red neck' legislation designed to undercut and destroy local autonomy and the voter rights of citizens in targeted jurisdictions as well as passing legislation against labor, including receding many of the collective bargaining rights signed into law by Republican Gov. George Romney, 1965. Who benefits from this crusade? "Workers are over-paid" Betsy DeVos and the invitation only Business Leaders for Michigan who have been bailed out and enriched with other people's tax dollars and ridiculously over-generous pro-corporate legislation!

Snyder’s Michissippi Gives Rise to the Revival of 21st Century ‘Jim Crow’ via TeaPartisan Legislation Imposing ‘EM Plantations’ Across the State... and the Nation.

Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

A Strange Paradox: Historic Jim Crow Was Born First in the Cities of Northern States
"Jim Crow" developed in northern segregated cities BEFORE it moved south and regressed post-civil war reconstruction in the South. Now in a parallel universe, Snyder's EM Plantation reinvention of economic and racial repression heralds a Neo-Jim Crow method to enforce and implement repressive racial segregation and economic subjugation via quasi-legal and economic means.

Snyder & Dillon's usurpation of urban civil and citizens rights, the Rad Right's abolition of the voter's franchise, and the literal liquidation of the public's storehouse of taxpayer acquired and sustained assets, via the 2010 blitz of enabling legislation passed by the TeaPartisan Super Majority in Lansing is under way, Jim Crow is on the rise.

Snyder's invention of 21st Century Neo-Jim Crow bodes very negatively for the future of racial harmony and skews progress away from eventual positive outcomes. Is it any wonder Detroit's Black middle class/individuals have chosen to take their future hopes to another state, many choosing a new locale in the New South.

Segregation (complete separation of races) was developed and refined in Northern cities where small concentrations of people of color could be confined to certain areas. In the reactionary 1980's and '90's following the take down of Reconstruction by Republicans racists transplanted Jim Crow into the angry South.

The kind of segregation under the status quo ante bellum days of slavery was less of a rigid system of separation of the races than was the apartheid practiced in many northern cites. The model of physical separation into designated areas and/or ghettos the root of Jim Crow developed in northern cities. In slave days, the intermingling of races was much more nominative, whites and blacks were intermingled in everyday southern life, housemaids, nannies, workers, etc.

More casual and daily contact was involved in the culture and daily life in the South than was found in the rigorous and aggressive behaviors so often associated with the Northern Jim Crow urban segregation-as it developed and was practiced many areas and cities of the North. Following the failure of Reconstruction, the North's version of Jim Crow fit perfectly with the rise of the KKK and radical race hatred and fear that dominated the next decades of ugly race relations and regression in the Deep South and as Jim Crow continued in the northern cities where it was first practiced. Several southern states still have Jim Crow laws on the books. Some of these laws draw distinctions mirrored in the actions and legislation of Snyder and the TeaPartisans in Michissippi.


Fact: The Boston Tea Party Was A Criminal Act
The adoption of the Revolutionary incident of the Boston Tea Party as an archetype for this faction's modus operandi (means to overreach and grab excessive government power) has a strong erroneous message to deliver-civic crime is not virtue.

Original Occupy Boston? Warning flyer against the corporate interests
and monopoly of the East India Co. November 29, 1773

The Boston Tea Partiers disguised themselves as savage Indians (to throw off blame) and committed economic terrorism (against economic rivals, themselves 'bootleggers') by deliberate criminal acts-destroying highly valuable cargo. The subversive text running just below the banners ('Don't Trend on Me,' the 'Just leave us alone' howlings, and their banishing of sidearms at the ready) is that these astroturf cells have been ginned up and are entirely controlled by elements traced directly to the Koch Bros.' Americans for Prosperity, Grover Norquist, and finally a nasty religious fundamentalism which fuels the TP rabble. They did as they were trained/told, and the disunifing public outcome (in the service of such anti-government elites such as Amway, the Waltons of Walmart and the Koch's) has fallen us all to bear.

The operating myth of Norquist's severe tax limitation movement is carried on by elevating the vision of a vicious felony, the glorification of a violent criminal act. This vision involves starving Uncle Sam (by any and all means limiting taxes and revenues) into losing strength and vitality, until having become so emaciated, Uncle is subsequently unable to fend off being manhandled into a bathtub, now so shriveled and weak, as to be forcibly drown by these activists. This is again, the fanciful and ugly depiction of criminality that propels Norquistian radicals and the TeaPartisans of the sort Grover continuously fans into flames.

So when tax starvation leads to bold repression of minorities and the poor, public employees and teachers, especially those in despised inner cities such as Detroit; the rise of Neo-Jim Crow naturally and tragically follows.

Michigan's Public Act 4, 2011
The advent of regression under Snyder/Dillon led Jim Crow centers around the imposition of the newly stiffened and much more dictatorial PA 4 designed to literally change a democratically-run Detroit into a Jim Crow Plantation where the citizens of Detroit are disenfranchised, humiliated, limited and corralled and herded by the whims of highly compensated corporate attorneys trained in methods to dissolve systems, sell off valuable assets, and counterman the will of the citizens.

There's a clear distinction between civil liberties, which are the laws protecting citizens from unjust government power and control, and civil rights, in which government power is used to protect the rights of a marginalized or minority population from other citizen groups. Therefore, this is a case of rogue Corporatists ordering CEO Snyder and radical elements now in total charge of the Michigan Legislature via the insurgent TeaPartisans going on a racial rampage.

These ideological elements, who have full control of the entire four branches of the state, are recklessly acting against both civil liberties and voter rights; subjecting minorities to unjust governmental power and control.
The legislature of Michissippi has been the sponsor of a new 21st Century "Jim Crow" that will metastasize and spread to other areas, even re-infest the South-still under lingering bigotry and racism stoked by Republican strategists.

Snyder's Michissippian model, 21st Century Neo-Jim Crow/EM Plantation(s), constitutes a very evil and volatile lapse- capable of tearing the fabric of our nation with economic racism and bitter minority blowback...there already is talk of Snyder's EM/Jim Crow model spreading to other states.

On the Reader:
More on the history of Jim Crow imaginary visit the Ferris State University's "Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia".

And the real story of the Boston Tea Party by Thom Hartmann based on the only first-hand account by George R.T. Hewes (Video).

More on Emergency Management issue in EM Plantation/Jim Crow Series in "A Shout Out to the Overlords of Michissippian EM Plantations (Michigan EM)" - "Jim Crow & Hank Payne Call for Detroit EM Martial Law: America’s First Urban Apartheid EM Plantation" - "High up in Jim Crow’s Nest: Constant Cawing Incites Civic Upheaval by the Detroit News - Michigan View" on the Gazette.


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