Michigan cities from tiny Benton Harbor to Flint to Pontiac all
the way up to Detroit are in the death grip of a financial crisis in the wake of the housing crash and near
collapse of the auto industry. In a desperate move to turn things
around, Republican Governor Rick Snyder invoked Public Act 4, legislation that allows him to appoint city managers
to take over cities in dire financial circumstances and enact drastic austerity
measures. These managers are empowered to renegotiate union contracts,
amend budgets, eliminate departments, even overrule or remove mayors and other
elected officials if necessary.
The law's
supporters say it allows for a more effective response to the state’s budget
crisis. Even ABC
acknowledged that these emergency measures are rescuing a growing number of
cities from bankruptcy and thus preserving vital services for the citizens,
including the same blacks that Maddow claims are being victimized by the
procedure.
As she has ever since she began covering the story a year
ago, the incessantly inflammatory Maddow attacked Michigan Republicans in her
April 2, 2012 segment for subverting democracy, “stripping” the impoverished
blacks in Benton Harbor of their right to rule themselves, and installing a “tyrant”
who “will have unilateral power to destroy the town if he wants to, to dissolve
it.” This is typical fear-mongering hyperbole on her part – the city manager is
not there to destroy the dysfunctional town, but to keep forewarned public unions
and wasteful local politicians from driving it deeper into economic ruin.
Terry Stanton, information officer for Michigan's Department
of the Treasury, told
ABC last year that the intention of the law is to protect the health,
welfare and safety of local government:
No one likes to see their authority
taken away. But it's important to note that oftentimes it was the elected
officials who were the ones unable or unwilling to address financial problem
before they got crisis stage… The goal is never to have to appoint another
emergency manager.
Where circumstances require one, ABC noted in its piece free
of Maddow’s hysteria, the manager's mission is to go in, make necessary budget
and staffing changes, and get out as soon as possible, to allow the town to
return to self-governance.
Benton Harbor was the first place in which the city manager
was appointed (Flint has also been turned over to one, and Detroit could be
next). It’s population is largely black – in fact, the “San Francisco Bayview
National Black Newspaper,” which bills itself as “the most visited Black
newspaper on the web,” calls it
“the chocolate city” of Benton Harbor (imagine the gleeful shrieks of outrage
from Maddow and her MSNBC ilk if Fox News or FrontPage Mag referred to Benton
Harbor as a “chocolate city”).
And so the left, always on the lookout for an opportunity to
contort a story to suit their divisive racialist narrative, has made the little
town the flashpoint for the controversy and has stoked the flames with an
entire deck full of race cards in order to demonize Republicans. “Rachel
Maddow, Ed Schultz [her MSNBC cohort] Highlight Black Cities Taken Over by Michigan 'Tyrants,'” reads one headline
on a
news website catering to blacks [italics added]. Demagogue Jesse Jackson,
Jr., the race-baiting equivalent of an ambulance-chasing attorney, penned a
Chicago Sun-Times op-ed a year
ago in which he wrote that Benton
Harbor “may become to economic justice what the small town of Selma was to
civil rights.”
In her coverage, Maddow repeatedly refers to Gov. Snyder and
the managers as tyrants denying democracy to the city’s poor black inhabitants,
even creatively linking
the managers to the idea of “enhanced interrogation.” In her April 2
segment she painted the state’s Republicans as destroyers of democracy:
What Governor Rick Snyder and the
Republicans in the state legislature have done is upend the idea that in
America, we elect people to represent us. In American we are represented by a
democratic form of government. Michigan Republicans are ripping that idea out
by the roots.
Her condescending civics lesson conveniently ignores 1) the
fact that Snyder and the Republican majority were themselves democratically
elected by the people of Michigan to help solve this mess, 2) that Benton
Harbor’s emergency manager Joe Harris (who is black) was actually
appointed under the previous governor, a
Democrat, and 3) that a
survey from last year shows that Benton Harbor’s citizens support by a
two-to-one margin “the nullification of Benton Harbor’s labor agreements if it
would help decrease the city’s deficit.” Apparently, FrontPage writer David
Forsmark noted a year ago about the poll, those citizens
care more about whether a fire
truck will show up at their house, or a cop will respond to an armed robbery
than whether the city council’s feathers are ruffled — or whether the city’s garbage
collectors will continue to make about 4 times the average income (plus
benefits) of the people who pay their wages.
“In Rick Snyder’s Michigan,” Maddow declared with her usual
flare for untruth, “democracy is considered part of the problem.” Nonsense. No
one’s trying to rid the state of democracy; the law is a last-ditch temporary
effort to ensure the state’s solvency and the survival of the poor blacks
Maddow pretends to care about. But progressives like Maddow and Jesse Jackson
only care about poverty-stricken minorities insofar as the latter are useful in
perpetuating the formers’ narrative of racial victimization at the hands of
Evil White Republicans – not to mention perpetuating minority dependency on big
government.
