PRIVATIZATION IN MICHIGAN

In 2010, then-governor Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a new, more authoritarian version of that state’s Emergency Manager law, dispatching appointees to selected cities and school districts throughout the state, where local government and school boards would be replaced. This stripping of democracy as people knew it forebode dire consequences for the chosen municipalities and their residents.

Michigan residents rose up en masse, launching a petition drive to defeat the law. Labor unions, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, Communists and many others joined the campaign. When a referendum to repeal the law finally made the ballot, all but six out of Michigan’s 83 counties voted to get rid of it. However, the Snyder administration, ignoring  the will of the people, used the lame-duck session of the Legislature to repackage it, with minor tweaks, where it remains to this day.

What does the dismantling of democracy look like in Michigan? Among other things:

• A takeover and privatization of a beloved Park in Benton Harbor. It was converted into a golf course and high-rise apartments on the shores of Lake Michigan even though the park had been donated to the public for the children in perpetuity. Now residents there are prohibited from enjoying the area they want once owned as a city.
• in Pontiac, the EM privatized or regionalized practically all critical public services including  police, firefighters and 911 services. The famous Pontiac Silverdome was sold for literally pennies on the dollar.
• in Detroit, appropriation and regionalization of the mammoth Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water system was top of the to-do list and was largely achieved. As of 2023, 27% of Detroit households (170,000 people) were put at risk of water shutoffs. The world-famous Detroit Institute of Arts and the iconic Belle Isle Park were also driven to a partial privatization scheme.

The most shocking consequence of the Emergency Manager law was the disastrous Flint water crisis, where the Wall Street gods moved to consolidate their private seizure of water assets. No one could imagine in their wildest dreams that in four years an entire city would be poisoned by its emergency manager. The toll on human health – especially that of children – is incalculable and still haunts this community: the mental stress, the lowering of children’s academic achievements and behavioral issues, the sicknesses and untold deaths. It is not lost on the resilient people of Flint that they still must use bottled water and filters, yet they pay some of the highest water bills in the nation to corporate water “landlords” Steidel, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase.

Enter Project 2025, Michigan’s emergency manager regime on steroids.

All these things were done by edict, the people’s voices denied. So it is with project 2025 — we cannot even imagine the outcomes and forms this agenda could take. Just as the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, (a right-wing think tank) inspired the model for the Emergency Manager law, the infamous Heritage Foundation laid out the blueprint for Project  2025. Now the nation is facing a rude awakening, courtesy of this notorious plan to unravel democracy to an even greater degree. The corporate private property class has laid out its agenda and its vision to save itself, yet neither major party offers a plan to stop this train. The Republican presidential candidate claims he neither has anything to do with Project 2025 nor does he support it despite his being tied to its authors by a thousand threads.

This devolution of democracy as we’ve known it is a ruling class response to their dying capitalist system. Under the malfeasant attorney general Dana Nessel, Michigan courts  gave immunity to the former governor and his accomplices for the Flint Water crisis. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has rendered the president of the United States a Dictator in Chief by passing a breathtaking immunity ruling.

Project 2025 and other proposals to gut, eliminate or privatize federal agencies such as Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Veterans Affairs, along with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and more, beg the  question for the people’s combatants: How do we fight for unmet social needs while the doors for redressing grievances through our government are slammed  in our faces?

Despite the challenges, the resistance to the growing dystopia is rising. With more Google searches for Project 2025 than for Taylor Swift, the bad news is spreading fast. Billboards in Michigan, for example, urge residents to “GOOGLE IT!” Meetings, educational forums and more are proliferating through coordinating action plans around the country.

Project 2025 is real, but so is the resistance. Stay tuned.

Published on September 29, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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