Hidden under the thick blanket of snow covering the Great Lakes State, a conservative plot to roll back democracy at the local level seems to be gathering apace. If it is not stopped, then very soon nearly half of the state’s African-American population, or approximately 700,000 people, will be unable to influence the decisions of their local government.
The aegis of this coup against local self-government is the state’s emergency financial manager statute, passed by Michigan’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law by Republican Governor Rick Snyder on March 17, 2011. The draconian law allows the state of Michigan to designate units of local government – from school boards to the entire City of Detroit – to be in a state of financial emergency.
Once so determined, the governor can then appoint an “emergency financial manager” with such wide-ranging powers as to effectively suspend local self-government on budgetary matters until the crisis has passed. Under the rubric of this statutory authority, the emergency manager can “take any action or exercise any power or authority of any officer, employee, department, board, commission, or other similar entity of the local government, whether elected or appointed, relating to the operation of the local government. He or she can also remove, replace, appoint or confirm the appointments to any office, board, commission, authority or other entity which is within or is a component unit of the local government.”
With the stroke of a pen, then, an emergency financial manager can totally upend the decisions of local stakeholders and the will of the voters. He or she can raise taxes, lower taxes, hire or fire whomever they want, renegotiate government contracts and even privatize or contract out publically-owned city services such as power, police, fire service, water, sewage and the like. Much as how colonial governors could do almost anything within their domain, so too can Michigan’s emergency financial manager rule his or her fiefdom – even going so far as being able to dissolve the unit of local government itself.
Imagine that an economic slump occurs and strikes your town hard. Local government runs consistent deficits as a result and is perceived to be at a political impasse as to how to resolve the crisis. Instead of allowing the community to determine the course ahead through discussion and debate, the governor, like a king of old, swoops in, finds that your town is in a fiscal emergency and then effectively abolishes local democracy. A proconsul from the governor’s office arrives and can do anything they want – possibly abolishing your town, school district or any other irksome mechanism of local government in the process.
If this far-reaching power seems breathtakingly frightening to you, rest assured that you aren’t the only one. Michigan’s voters reacted angrily to this overreach by the state’s central authority and rejected the measure by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin in a referendum vote this past November. The GOP Legislature and governor, however, did not take being thwarted by the will of the electorate lightly.
Instead, they merely passed another law, broadly similar to the first, which removed the ability of the electorate to reject it via a referendum vote. It also, to be fair, watered down somewhat the tyrannical powers vested in the position of the emergency financial manager and added additional options for local buy-in and support for a state-mandated financial overhaul. By any measure, however, it remains a powerful piece of legislation that can compel a community to enact the will of outsiders sent in by a far-away central authority with its own agenda and interests.
Those interests, unsurprisingly, tend to reflect the attitudes of the business and financial elite that appoint them – meaning managers overwhelmingly focus on a combination of austerity measures and privatization of public services as the primary means of fulfilling their fiscal mandate. Often this means gutting payrolls, disbanding entire police departments or selling off local government property for what is perceived to be a pittance.
However, what is most troubling is the degree to which the law is effectively targeted at Michigan’s minority communities – which tend to be poorer and so have fewer resources with which to manage long economic slumps. This makes the fate of Detroit, by far the biggest Michigan city deemed to be in a fiscal emergency yet, so important. If, as seems likely, Governor Snyder appoints someone to effectively take over the running of Detroit by gubernatorial fiat, then nearly half the state’s African-American population will no longer have a voice over the running of their local community.
Moreover, given larger Republican efforts to restrict voting rights across the country through the imposition of stringent voting laws and their consistent manipulation of the machinery of elections to make voting, especially by the poor and minorities, as difficult as possible, this further suggests that the conservative-dominated GOP no longer really believes in the legitimacy of rule by the people – or, at least, the “wrong” type of people. For conservatives, then, local government is slated to become, as Justice Antonin Scalia might opine, just another racial “racial entitlement” that needs to be done away with.
While all this is undoubtedly terrible, what is interesting here is the way in which what is going on in Michigan is a microcosm of the larger struggle between democracy and capitalism both here in the United States and around the world. What is happening to Detroit looks very much like the type of strong-arming that Western powers have long used to impose their economic will on the developing world. From taking over governments in Central America in the 19th century to the imposition of harsh structural adjustment programs by the International Monetary Fund in the 20th and 21st, the notion that sound management of public finances is best done by an unelected, technocratic elite beholden only to capitalist financiers is an old one.
What is new, however, is that this idea is now being applied within the United States itself – a country literally founded upon the principle of “no taxation without representation.” There would seem to be no greater violation of this American ideal than what is taking place in Michigan, where local governance survives now at the sufferance of state fiscal experts. This suggests that in the struggle between democracy and an unaccountable capitalism, it is currently unaccountable capitalism that is winning in the United States – or at least an important part of it.