http://michigancitizen.com/efm-is-new-jim-crow-p9577-1.htm
This assault on democracy is justified by an extreme financial crisis. Yet, the crisis itself has been manufactured by legislative actions that have systematically dismantled the public sphere. It is a crisis created by fostering an ideology of individual greed, claiming that we have no shared responsibilities for common life. It is a crisis created to justify turning public responsibilities into private profits.
Those who support EMs have been engaged in a propaganda campaign to say the financial crisis we face is our fault because of corruption, bloated unions, over-extended pensions and incompetence. While we have certainly experienced all these, the crisis we face was not produced by these foibles.
In a recent article in the Kalamazoo Gazette, long-time budget analyst Julie Mack wrote:
“The biggest factors in Michigan’s ongoing budget struggles lie elsewhere. In the late 1990s and into the early part of the past decade, lawmakers did a lot of tax-cutting without offsetting reductions in expenditures. For years, balancing the state budget involved a series of one-time fixes and accounting tricks, from draining the state’s rainy-day fund to selling out the state’s tobacco settlement for pennies on the dollar.
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