“Michigan is winning the ‘race to the bottom’,
rapidly transforming itself into the Mississippi of the Midwest”.
-----from
the “Quotations of Chairman Joe”As noted in a previous post (1), according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, median household income in my old home state of Michigan fell by $13,278.00 between 2000 and 2013. According to the report a truly ‘staggering drop”. The rot runs deep permeating the old industrial heartland and now threatening the entire nation.
In an essay entitled “Michigan: A Magical Mystery Tour of American Austerity Politics”, first appearing on the website TomDispatch and republished by Bill Moyers on the website “Moyers and Company”, Laura Gottesdiener and Eduardo GarcÃa take us on a “Magical” or, more appropriately “Tragical” tour of my beloved Michigan revealing what has befallen the great State under nearly three decades of ‘benign neglect’. The following is the article as it appeared in almost its entirety:
“Something
is rotten in the state of Michigan.
One city
neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with
cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced
it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management
company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit.
Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single,
state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager
law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor.
This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but
gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including
dissolving the city itself — all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of
“fiscal responsibility.”
If
you’re thinking, “Who cares?” since what happens in Michigan stays in Michigan,
think again. The state’s aggressive balance-the-books style of governance has
already spread beyond its borders. In January, New Jersey Governor Chris
Christie appointed bankruptcy lawyer and former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn
Orr to be a “legal adviser” to Atlantic City. The Detroit Free Press described the move as “a state
takeover similar to Gov. Rick Snyder’s state intervention in the Motor City.”
And this
spring, amid the hullabaloo of Republicans entering the 2016 presidential race,
Governor Snyder launched his own national tour to sell “the Michigan story to the rest of
the country.” His trip was funded by a nonprofit (fed, naturally, by
undisclosed donations) named “Making Government Accountable: The Michigan
Story.”
To many
Michiganders, this sounded as ridiculous as Jeb Bush launching a super PAC
dubbed “Making Iraq Free: The Bush Family Story.” Except Snyder wasn’t planning
to enter the presidential rat race. Instead, he was attempting to mainstream
Michigan’s form of austerity politics and its signature emergency management
legislation, which stripped more than half of the state’s
African-American residents of their local voting rights in 2013 and 2014.
As the
governor jaunted around the country, Ann Arbor-based photographer Eduardo
GarcÃa and I decided to set out on what we thought of as our own two-week
Magical Michigan Tour. And while we weren’t driving a specially outfitted
psychedelic tour bus — we spent most of the trip in my grandmother’s 2005 Prius
— our journey was nevertheless remarkably surreal. From the southwest banks of
Lake Michigan to the eastern tips of the peninsula, we crisscrossed the state
visiting more than half a dozen cities to see if there was another side to the
governor’s story and whether Michigan really was, as one Detroit resident put
it, “a massive experiment in unraveling US democracy.”
Stop
One: Water Wars in Flint
Just as
we arrive, the march spills off the sidewalk in front of the city council
building.
“Stop
poisoning our children!” chants a little girl as the crowd tumbles down South
Saginaw Street, the city’s main drag. We’re in Flint, Michigan, a place that
hit the headlines last year for its brown, chemical-laced, possibly toxic
water. A wispy white-haired woman waves a gallon jug filled with
pee-colored liquid from her home tap. “They don’t care that they’re killing
us!” she cries.
We
catch up with Claire McClinton, the formidable if grandmotherly organizer of
the Flint Democracy Defense League, as we approach the roiling Flint River.
It’s been a longtime dumping ground for the Ford Motor Company’s riverfront
factories and, as of one year ago today, the only source of the city’s drinking
water. On April 25, 2014, on the instruction of the city’s emergency
manager, Flint stopped buying its supplies from the Detroit Water and Sewerage
Department and started drawing water directly from the river, which meant a
budgetary savings of $12 million a year. The downside: people
started getting sick.
Since
then, tests have detected E. coli and
fecal bacteria in the water, as well as high levels of trihalomethanes,
a carcinogenic chemical cocktail known as THMs. For months, the city concealed
the presence of THMs, which over years can lead to increased rates of cancer,
kidney failure and birth defects. Still, it was obvious to local residents that
something was up. Some of them were breaking out in mysterious rashes or
experiencing bouts of severe diarrhea, while others watched as their eyelashes and hair began
to fall out.
As we
cross a small footbridge, McClinton recounts how the city council recently voted to “do all things necessary” to get
Detroit’s water back. The emergency manager, however, immediately overrode
their decision, terming it “incomprehensible.”
“This is
a whole different model of control,” she comments drily and explains that she’s
now working with other residents to file an injunction compelling the city to
return to the use of Detroit’s water. One problem, though: it has to be filed
in Ingham County, home to Lansing, the state capital, rather than in Flint’s
Genesee County, because the decision of a state-appointed emergency manager is
being challenged. “Under state rule, that’s where you go to redress
grievances,” she says. “Just another undermining of our local authority.”
In the
meantime, many city residents remain frustrated and confused. A few weeks
before the march, the city sent out two notices on the same day, packaged in
the same envelope. One, printed in black-and-white, stated bluntly: “Our water
system recently violated a drinking water standard.” The second, in flashy
color, had this cheery message: “We are pleased to report that City of Flint
water is safe and meets US Environmental Protection Agency guidelines… You can
be confident that the water provided to you today meets all safety standards.”
As one recipient of the notices commented, “I can only surmise that the point
was to confuse us all.”
McClinton
marches in silence for a few minutes as the crowd doubles back across the
bridge and begins the ascent up Saginaw Street. Suddenly, a man jumps onto a
life-size statue of a runner at the Riverfront Plaza and begins to cloak him in
one of the group’s T-shirts.
“Honey,
I don’t want you getting in any trouble!” his wife calls out to him.
He’s
struggling to pull a sleeve over one of the cast-iron arms when the droning weeoo-weeooo-weeoo of a police siren blares, causing a brief
frenzy until the man’s son realizes he’s mistakenly hit the siren feature on
the megaphone he’s carrying.
After a
few more tense moments, the crowd surges forward, leaving behind the statue,
legs stretched in mid-stride, arms raised triumphantly and on his chest a new
cotton T-shirt with the slogan: “Water You Fighting For?”
Stop
Two: The Tri-Cities of Cancer
The next
afternoon, we barrel down Interstate 75 into an industrial hellscape of smoke
stacks, flare offs and 18-wheelers, en route to another toxicity and
accountability crisis. This one was caused by a massive tar sands refinery and
dozens of other industrial polluters in southwest Detroit and neighboring River
Rouge and Ecorse, cities which lie along the banks of the Detroit River.
Already
with a slight headache from a haze of emissions, we meet photographer and
community leader Emma Lockridge and her neighbor Anthony Parker in front of
their homes, which sit right in the backyard of that tar sands refinery.
In 2006,
the toxicity levels in their neighborhood, known simply by its zip code as
“48217,” were 45 times higher than the state average. And
that was before Detroit gave $175 million in tax breaks to the billion-dollar Marathon
Petroleum Corporation to help it expand its refinery complex to process a surge
of high-sulfur tar sands from Alberta, Canada.
“We’re
a donor zip,” explains Lockridge as she settles into the driver’s seat of our
car. “We have all the industry and a tax base, but we get nothing back.”
We set
off on a whirlwind tour of their neighborhood, where schools have been torn
down and parks closed due to the toxicity of the soil, while so many residents
have died of cancer that it’s hard for their neighbors to keep track. “We used
to play on the swings here,” says Lockridge, pointing to a rusted yellow swing
set in a fenced-off lot where the soil has tested for high levels of lead,
arsenic and other poisonous chemicals. “Jumping right into the lead.”
As in
other regions of Michigan, people have been fleeing 48217 in droves. Here,
however, the depopulation results not from deindustrialization, but from
toxicity, thanks to an ever-expanding set of factories. These include a
wastewater treatment complex, salt mines, asphalt factories, cement plants, a
lime and stone foundry and a handful of steel mills all clustered in the
tri-cities region.
As
Lockridge and Parker explain, they have demanded that Marathon buy their homes.
They have also implored the state to cap emission levels and have filed
lawsuits against particularly toxic factories. In response, all they’ve seen
are more factories given more breaks, while the residents of 48217 get none.
Last spring, for example, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
permitted the AK Steel plant, located close to the neighborhood, to increase its toxic emissions as much as 725 times. The approval, according to the Detroit Free Press, came after
“Gov. Rick Snyder’s business-promoting agency worked for months behind the
scenes” lobbying the Department of Environmental Quality.
“Look at
this cute little tree out of nowhere over here!” Lockridge exclaims, slowing
the car in front of a scrawny plant whose branches, in the midst of this
industrial wasteland, bend under the weight of white blossoms.
“That
tree ain’t gonna grow up,” Parker responds. “It’s dead already.”
“It’s
trying,” Lockridge insists. “Aww, it’s kind of sad. It’s a Charlie Brown tree.”
The
absurdity of life in such an environment is highlighted when we reach a
half-mile stretch of sidewalk sandwiched between a massive steel mill and a
coal-fired power plant that has been designated a “Wellness Walk.”
“Energize
your Life!” implores the sign affixed to a chain-link fence surrounding the
power plant. It’s an unlikely site for an exercise walk, given that the state’s
health officials consider this strip and the nearby
park “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.”
After a
sad laugh, we head for Zug Island, a Homeland Security-patrolled area populated
by what look to be giant black vacuum cleaners but are actually blast furnaces. The island was named for
millionaire Samuel Zug, who built a lavish mansion there only to discover that
it was sinking into swampland. It is now home to US Steel, the largest steel
manufacturer in the nation.
On our
way back, we make a final stop at Oakwood Heights, an almost entirely vacant
and partially razed subdivision located on the other side of the Marathon
plant. “This is the white area that was bought out,” says Lockridge. The scene
is eerie: small residential streets lined by grassy fields and the occasional
empty house. That Marathon paid residents to evacuate their homes in
this predominantly white section of town, while refusing to do the same in the
predominantly African-American 48217, which sits closer to the refinery,
strikes neither Lockridge and Parker nor their neighbors as a coincidence.
We
survey the remnants of the former neighborhood: bundles of ragged newspapers
someone was once supposed to deliver, a stuffed teddy bear abandoned on a
wooden porch and a childless triangle-shaped playground whose construction, a
sign reads, was “made possible by generous donations from Marathon.”
As this
particularly unmagical stop on our Michigan tour comes to an end, Parker says
quietly, “I’ve got to get my family out of here.”
Lockridge
agrees. “I just wish we had a refuge place we could go to while we’re
fighting,” she says. “You see we’re surrounded.”
Stop
Three: The Great White North
Not all
of Michigan’s problems are caused by emergency management, but this sweeping
new power does lie at the heart of many local controversies. Later that night
we meet with retired Detroit city worker, journalist and organizer Russ Bellant
who has made himself something of an expert on the subject.
In 2011,
he explains, Governor Snyder signed an emergency manager law known as Public
Act 4. The impact of this law and its predecessor, Public Act 72, was dramatic.
In the city of Pontiac, for instance, the number of public employees plummeted from 600 to 50. In Detroit, the
emergency manager of the school district waged a six-year slash-and-burn
campaign that, in the end, shuttered 95 schools. In Benton Harbor, the manager
effectively dissolved the city government, declaring: “The fact of the matter is, the
city manager is now gone. I am the city manager. I replace the financial
director, so I’m the financial director and the city manager. I am the mayor
and the commission. And I don’t need them.”
So in
2012, Bellant cancelled all his commitments in Detroit, packed his car full of
chocolate pudding snacks, canned juices and fliers and headed north to support
a statewide campaign to repeal the law through a ballot referendum in that
fall’s general election. For two months, he crisscrossed the upper reaches of
Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the part of the state that people say looks like a
hand, as well as the remote Upper Peninsula that borders Wisconsin and Canada.
“Seven
or eight hours a day, I would just knock on doors,” he says.
In
November, the efforts paid off and voters repealed the act, but the celebration
was short-lived. Less than two months later, during a lame-duck session of the
state legislature, Governor Snyder pushed through and signed Public Act 436, a
broader version of the legislation that was referendum-proof. Since then, financial
managers have continued to shut down fire departments, outsource police departments, sell off parking meters and public parks.
In Flint, the manager even auctioned off the plastic Santa Claus that once
adorned city hall, setting the initial bidding price at $5.
And
here’s one fact of life in Michigan: emergency management is normally only
imposed on majority-black cities. From 2013 to 2014, 52 percent of the
African-American residents in the state lived under emergency management,
compared to only 2 percent of white residents. And yet the repeal vote against
the previous version of the act was a demographic landslide: 75 out of 83 counties voted to nix the legislation, including
all of Michigan’s northern, overwhelmingly white, rural counties. “I think
people just internalized that P.A. 4 was undemocratic,” Bellant says.
That
next morning, we travel north to the city of Alpena, a 97 percent white lakeside town where Bellant knocked on
doors and the recall was triumphant. The farther north we head, the more the
landscape changes. We pass signs imploring residents to “Take Back America:
Liberty Yes, Tyranny No.” Gas stations feature clay figurines of hillbillies
drinking moonshine in bathtubs.
It’s
almost evening when we arrive. We spend part of our visit at the Dry Dock, a
dive bar overseen by a raspy-voiced bartender where all the political and
demographic divides of the state — and, in many ways, the country — are on full
display. Two masons are arguing about their union; the younger one likes the
protections it provides, while his colleague ditched the local because he
didn’t want to pay the dues. That move became possible only after Snyder signed controversial
“right-to-work” legislation in 2012, allowing workers to opt-out of union dues
and causing a sharp decline in union membership ever
since.
Above
their heads, the television screen projects intentionally terrifying images of
the uprising in Baltimore in response to the police murder of Freddie Gray, an
unarmed African-American man. “The Bloods, the Crips, and the Guerrillas are
out for the National Guard,” comments a carpenter about the unarmed protesters,
a sneer of distain in his voice. “Not that I like the f****** cops, either,” he
adds.
Throughout
our visit, people repeatedly told us that Alpena “isn’t Detroit or Flint” and
that they have absolutely no fear of the state seizing control of their sleepy,
white, touristy city. When we press the question with the owner of a bicycle
shop, the hostility rises in his voice as he explains: “Things just run the way
they should here” — by which he means, of course, that down in Detroit and
Flint, residents don’t run things the way they
should.
Yet,
misconceptions notwithstanding, the county voted to repeal Public Act 4 with a
staggering 63 percent of those who turned out opting to strike down the law.
Reflecting
Bellant’s feeling that locals grasped the law’s undemocratic nature in some
basic way, even if it would never affect them personally, one resident offered
this explanation: “When you think about living in a democracy, then this is
like financial martial law… I know they say these cities need help, but it
didn’t feel like something that would help.”
Stop
Four: The Fugitive Task Force
The next
day, as 2,000 soldiers from the 175th Infantry Regiment of the National Guard fanned out across Baltimore, we head for
Detroit’s west side where, only 24 hours earlier, a law enforcement officer
shot and killed a 20-year-old man in his living room.
A crowd
has already gathered near his house in the early summer heat, exchanging
condolences, waving signs and jostling for position as news crews set up
cameras and microphones for a press conference to come. Versions of what
happened quickly spread: Terrance Kellom was fatally shot when officers swarmed
his house to deliver an arrest warrant. The authorities claim that he grabbed a
hammer, prompting the shooting; his father, Kevin, contends Terrance was
unarmed and kneeling in front of him when he was shot several times, including
once in the back.
Kellom
is just one of the 489 people killed in 2015 in the United
States by law enforcement officers. There is, however, a disturbing twist to
Kellom’s case. He was not, in fact, killed by the police but by a federal agent
working with a little known multi-jurisdictional interagency task force coordinated
by the US Marshals.
Similar
task forces are deployed across the country and they all share the same sordid
history: the Marshals have been hunting people ever since the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Act compelled the agency to capture slaves
fleeing north for freedom. One 19th-century newspaper account, celebrating the
use of bloodhounds in such hunts, wrote: “The Cuban dog would frequently pull
down his game and tear the runaway to pieces before the officers could come
up.”
These
days, Detroit’s task force has grown particularly active as budget cuts have
decimated the local police department. Made up of federal Immigration and
Customs officers, police from half a dozen local departments and even employees
of the Social Security Administration office, the Detroit Fugitive Apprehension
Team has nabbed more than 15,000 people. Arrest rates have soared
since 2012, the same year the local police budget was chopped by 20 percent.
Even beyond the task force, the number of federal agents patrolling the city
has risen as well. The Border Patrol, for example, has increased its presence
in the region by tenfold over the last decade and just two
weeks ago announced the launch of a new $14 million Detroit station.
Kevin
Kellom approaches the barricade of microphones and begins speaking so quietly
that the gathered newscasters crush into each other in an effort to catch
what’s he’s saying. “They assassinated my son,” he whispers. “I want justice
and I’m going to get justice.”
Yet
today, six weeks after Terrance’s death, no charges have been brought against
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fired the fatal shot. Other
law enforcement officers who have killed Michigan residents in recent years
have similarly escaped punishment. Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley was
videotaped killing seven-year-old Aiyana Jones with a
submachine gun during a SWAT team raid on her home in 2010. He remains a member
of the department. Ann Arbor police officer David Reid is also back on duty after fatally shooting
40-year-old artist and mother Aura Rosser in November 2014. The Ann Arbor
police department ruled that a “justifiable homicide” because Rosser was
holding a small kitchen knife during the encounter — a
ruling that Rosser’s family members and city residents are contesting with an
ongoing campaign calling for an independent investigation into her death.
And
such deadly incidents continue. Since Kellom’s death, law enforcement officers
have fatally shot at least three more Michigan residents — one outside the city of Kalamazoo, another near Lansing, and a third in Battle Creek.
Stop
Five: The Unprofitable All-Charter School District
Our
final stop is Muskegon Heights, a small city on the banks of Lake Michigan,
home to perhaps the most spectacular educational debacle in recent history.
Here’s the SparkNotes version. In 2012, members of the Muskegon Heights public
school board were given two options: dissolve the district entirely or succumb
to an emergency manager’s rule. On arrival, the manager announced that he was
dissolving the public school district and forming a new system to be run by the
New York-based for-profit charter school management company Mosaica Education.
Two years later, that company broke its five-year contract and fled because, according to the emergency manager, “the
profit just simply wasn’t there.”
And
here’s a grim footnote to this saga: in 2012, in preparation for the new
charter school district, cryptically named the Muskegon Heights Public School
Academy System, the emergency manager laid off every single school employee.
“We knew
it was coming,” explained one of the city’s longtime elementary school
teachers. She asked not to be identified, so I’ll call her Susan. “We received
letters in the mail.”
Then,
around 1 a.m. the night before the new charter school district was slated to
open, she received a voicemail asking if she could teach the following morning.
She agreed, arriving at Martin Luther King Elementary School for what would be
the worst year in her more than two-decade career.
When we
visit that school, a single-story brick building on the east side of town, the
glass of the front door had been smashed and the halls were empty, save for two
people removing air conditioning units. But in the fall of 2012, when Susan was
summoned, Martin Luther King was still filled with students — and chaos.
Schedules were in disarray. Student computers were broken. There were supply
shortages of just about everything, even rolls of toilet paper. The district’s
already barebones special education program had been further gutted. The “new,” non-unionized
teaching staff — about 10 percent of whom initially did not
have valid teaching certificates — were overwhelmingly young, inexperienced and
white. (Approximately 75 percent of the town’s residents are African-American.)
“Everything
was about money, I felt, and everyone else felt it, too,” Susan says.
With
her salary slashed to less than $30,000, she picked up a second job at a nearby
after-school program. Her health faltered. Instructed by the new administration
never to sit down during class, a back condition worsened until surgery was
required. The stress began to affect her short-term memory. Finally, in the
spring, Susan sought medical leave and never came back.
She was
part of a mass exodus. Advocates say that more than half the teachers were
either fired, quit, or took medical leave before the 2012-2013 school year
ended. Mosaica itself wasn’t far behind, breaking its contract at the end of
the 2014 school year. The emergency manager said he understood the company’s
financial assessment, comparing the school system to “a broke-down car.” That spring, Governor
Snyder visited and called the district “a work in
progress.”
Across
the state, the education trend has been toward privatization and increased control over local districts by
the governor’s office, with results that are, to say the least, underwhelming.
This spring, a report from The Education Trust, an independent national
education nonprofit, warned that the state’s system had gone
“from bad to worse.”
“We’re
now on track to perform lower than the nation’s lowest-performing states,” the
report’s author, Amber Arellano, told the local news.
Later
that afternoon, we visited the city’s James Jackson Museum of African-American
History, where we sat with Dr. James Jackson, a family physician and longtime
advocate of community-controlled public education in the city.
He
explains that the city’s now-failing struggle for local control and quality
education is part of a significantly longer history. Most of the town’s
families originally arrived here in the first half of the 20th century from the
Jim Crow South, where public schools for Black students were not only abysmally
underfunded, but also thwarted by censorship and outside governance, as
historian Carter Goodwin Woodson explained in his groundbreaking 1933 study, The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Well into the 20th century, for example, the Declaration of Independence and
the US Constitution were barred from grade-school textbooks for being too
aspirational. “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about
his actions,” Woodson wrote back then.
More
than eight decades later, Dr. Jackson offered similar thoughts about the
Muskegon Heights takeover as he led us through the museum, his bright yellow
T-shirt reminding us to “Honor Black History Every Day 24/7 — 365.”
“We have
to control our own education,” Jackson said, as we passed sepia newspaper
clippings of civil rights marches and an 1825 bill of sale for Peggy and her
son Jonathan, purchased for $371 by James Aiken of Warren County, Georgia.
“Until we control our own school system, we can’t be properly educated.”
As we
leave, we stop a moment to take in an electronic sign hanging in the museum’s
window that, between announcements about upcoming book club meetings and the
establishment’s hours, flashed this refrain in red letters:
The
education of
Muskegon Heights
Belongs to the People
Not the governor
Muskegon Heights
Belongs to the People
Not the governor
The
following day, we finally arrived back in Detroit, our notebooks and iPhone
audio records and camera memory cards filled to the brim, heads spinning from
everything we had seen, our aging Prius-turned-tour-bus in serious need of an
oil change.
While we
had been bumping along on our Magical Michigan Tour, the national landscape
had, in some ways, grown even more surreal. Bernie Sanders, the independent
socialist senator from Vermont, announced that he was challenging Hillary
Clinton for the Democratic ticket. Detroit neuroscientist Dr. Ben Carson —
famous for declaring that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in
this nation since slavery” — entered the Republican circus. And amid the
turmoil, Governor Snyder’s style continued to attract attention, including from
the editors of Bloomberg View, who touted his experience with “urban
revitalization,” concluding: “His brand of politics deserves a wider audience.”
So
buckle your seat belts and watch out. In some “revitalized” Bloombergian
future, you, too, could flee your school district like the students and teachers
of Muskegon Heights, or drink contaminated water under the mandate of a
state-appointed manager like the residents of Flint, or be guaranteed toxic
fumes to breathe like the neighbors of 48217, or get shot like Terrance Kellom
by federal agents in your own living room. All you have to do is let Rick
Snyder’s yellow submarine cruise into your neighborhood.” (2)
These five ‘vignettes’, are snapshots if you will, of
contemporary life in what was once the industrial heartland of America. A compelling portrait of how deep runs the
rot. Once a Mecca for millions of
Southern Whites, Blacks, Latinos and others in their quest to get a purchase on
the middle class Michigan has become, in the hands of men like John Engler and
Rick Snyder, a ‘hollowed out’ dumping ground (3), with rapidly deteriorating
standards of living, tax base, education and infrastructure where truly the
conservative ideal has become the community’s nightmare; a ‘Bell Weather’ example
of where the American Dream goes to die.
In my early 50’s I left the state of Michigan for points
south in search of employment, a journey with mixed results, for I had learned
early in life that what happens to me happens to my community, what happens to
my community happens to my state, and what happens to my state happens to my
country. Indeed Snyder and his fellow
Rescumlicans, waving flags of ‘freedom’, have a cruise waiting for you.
-------
(1) See March 23, 2015: Malignancy of Swine, Turning of the Screws, Marrow of
the Republic
(2) http://billmoyers.com/2015/06/12/michigan-a-magical-mystery-tour-of-american-austerity-politics/
(3) Former
Michigan Governor John Engler is best remembered for allowing Canada to use
Michigan as a dumping ground, importing waste from Ontario. It was under his administration that the
State began to go ‘south’, transforming Michigan into the Louisiana if not the
Mississippi of the midwest.
