Perhaps they’ve learned the “by any means necessary” lesson. You gotta get tough to fight the (union) man.
“By any means necessary” includng ignoring the state constitution? So they can lie and cheat and disregard their sworn duties to rob the working people? Those types of actions are why we need unions in the first place. And the those who think they’re no longer needed…think again. Look how these legislative thieves act when there still are unions to protest. What will they do when there aren’t any? If you think “So who cares, my job is safe, I’m a good worker” you’'re wrong. It’s not about weeding out bad workers. It’s about taking away rights and benefits from all workers, indeed all voters. Don’t care about Detroit? Would you care if all the elected officals in your town got replaced with the Governor’s crony because your town has financial difficulties? It starts with “fiscal responsibility” as the excuse. It won’t end fhere.
I don’t think ITR is going to come back and defend his talking point; he is just keeping to the right wing meme without having any data to back it up. There are lots of problems in Michagan, and unions may actually contribute to some of them, but they are not the root of the problem. Just like the unions were not the root of the demise of the steel industry. What is going on in Michigan is due to the invisible hand and the tide of history, not because teachers are trying to make a living wage and keep their jobs as the student base shrinks.
Hmmm…looks like now would be a good time to incorporate a new business in Detroit.
I think Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has a nice ring, don’t you?
What a splendidly subtle argument! Democracy is dying in Michigan, as our OP breathlessly titled his thread, because … the popularly elected Legislature is not deferring to a committee of bureaucrats!
As for the emergency manager law, which does appear troubling on its face, municipalities have always been considered fully subordinate organs of the sovereign state (home rule, I should add, complicates this picture a touch). I’m not sure the emergency managers are a great program from a policy standpoint, since they will nevertheless stir up resentment by being perceived as being dictated from without (although, Michigan’s state government is also answerable to the popularly elected legislature).
As for wanted to ensuring the vitality of the city of Detroit, I quite agree. Anyone who thinks the state of Michigan would be well-served by the city of Detroit “folding in a matter of weeks” is obviously a dope who doesn’t have much to contribute to the discussion.
Fiscal crisis is not “due to” any one thing. A city has a budget, with a certain amount of money coming in and a certain amount flowing out. Any decision on taxes or spending affects the city’s finances, so when a city like Detroit hits a financial disaster, it’s partially due to every decision that’s been made. But if we look at Detroit’s situation, it’s reasonable to assing a decent share of blame to the public unions.
First of all, Detroit’s tax burden is close to the nation’s highest, so one can hardly blame the city for grabbing too little money from its citizens.
Secondly, regarding spending, here’s a quote from the article I lniked to above:
The main cause of Detroit’s fiscal crisis is simple: Its unions have fought tooth and nail to protect jobs and pay even as Detroiters, reeling from their demands, have rushed to the exit doors. Detroit has lost two-thirds of its population since its peak of 2 million in the 1960s, but the rolls of city employees had until recently shrunk by only about one-third. The city government is the largest employer—after Detroit’s schools. Employee benefits alone make up half of the city’s general fund costs.
What’s more, Detroit’s public-sector legacy costs are astronomical. They include $5 billion to cover health care and other promises for retirees in decades to come and a billion for the unfunded liabilities to pension funds. This is not surprising given that the city has twice as many retirees as employees. And retirees get deals virtually unheard of in the private sector. For example, firefighters can retire at the ripe age of 55 with 70 percent of their salaries and automatic cost-of-living adjustments along with nearly full health-care benefits.
So there’s a ridiculously large number of current workers and a ridiculously large number of former workers, all sucking on the city’s teat. The benefits they have are insanely generous by any standard, doubly so in a desperately poor city. And as for the notion that it’s caused by the declining population and tax base, that begs the question, what caused the population to flee? Could it possibly be that some people left Detroit precisely because the taxes were so high? And if the taxes were high because that was the only way that the city could hand so much money to the public unions, doesn’t that make the public unions partially responsible for the declining population?
Democracy is dying all over this country, but not necessarily for the same reasons mentioned in the OP.
10 Ways Our Democracy Is Crumbling Around Us
Michigan’s just extra-super screwed.
At some point it stops being links in a chain and is just a few noodles tossed down that happen to overlap. Sure, it could be, and if it were, maybe the next step would follow, and if those happened, yeah, it’s not unimaginable that someone would try to paint this picture…
Wow. It even has a futuristic mid-90’s website design!
It’s interesting to see Maddow asserting that a supermajority vote is a required element of democracy. She’s been an opponent of supermajority requirements (i.e., filibustering) in the US Senate, calling routine filibustering “a really stupid way to run the country.”
No. The Legislature is ignoring the state Constitution, overstepping their authority, and silencing dissent by illegal voting maneuvers. The Governor seeks to replace entire local governments whenever he feels justified. This is not democracy.
Golf clap.
It is not her opinion; it is written into the Michigan state constitution that “immediate effect” requires a two-thirds majority.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why Republicans aren’t just as outraged over this as Dems. Do you really think you will never again be in the minority?
You might want to check out the “Liberal Media Bias” thread.
Right, and I would have more readily expected her to take the position that the threat to democracy is the supermajority requirement written into the state constitution, not the non-compliance with it.
Good law, bad law, not the point. The point is suspending the law for the convenience of a political party. As a thing itself, the requirement isn’t that bad, fairly sensible, actually. They built in a lag between enactment and enforcement so that all the procedures of dissent might be given space and time to play out. But they also recognized that there are situations of emergency, when things must be done at once. So a mechanism was built to accommodate that prospect.
In and of itself, perfectly reasonable. In this instance, however, one of the most crucial emergencies is the ghastly specter of voters of the wrong sort exercising their alleged “rights”.
Thanks for signifying your complete agreement. You can applaud wildly instead of being politely quiet next time.
Well, I’ve put forward my argument that the main cause of Detroit’s financial woes is the enormously generous union contracts and the high taxes. I don’t propose that we can entirely pin the high taxes on the high costs of the union contracts, but do you honestly dispute that they’re part of the reason why the tax burden is so high? And I don’t that every person who’s fled Detroit did so to escape the taxes, but there must be some reason why Detroit’s population has declined by more than any other city in American history.
For the purposes of this thread, though, the cause of the city’s ills is really tangential. The point is this. Detroit was days away from bankruptcy until the moment when the state agreed to help solve the problem. It would be ridiculous to expect Michigan’s state taxpayers to continue bailing out the city government if that government showed no signs of any willingness to cut pay and benefits to union employees. But the city didn’t show any sign of wanting to do that by itself, so that’s why it was necessary for the state to take the approach that it did.
Yes, you give examples of public employee unions in Michigan agreeing to concessions after it was clear that the state government was willing to play hardball. Presumably we both know that cities across the country have been hitting financial icebergs, usually involving high public employee salaries and pension costs. In Caliornia, when folks have tried to reign in public employee benefits, the result has been union bullying, distortions by public officials, and attempts to block the voters’ will by bureaucratic means. So in California, the unions know that the state government will always be on their side, working to block any reform. It’s quite understandable that folks in Michigan would not want to end up like California. Hence the need for a policy that says to the unions: negotiate some cuts or else. That strategy seems to be working better than California’s approach.
That’s what you thought my problem was?