DETROIT, MI — The Federal Court of Appeals hearing in Cincinnati is a significant fight by the victims of Michigan’s Emergency Management (dictator) law. The challenge to the law’s constitutionality has now been effectively raised at the Federal level. The appellants need and deserve our full support.
Michigan courts have been in lock step with the decisions to strip local school districts, cities and local government of democratic authority to govern, giving authority to the governor, who exercises it through the “emergency manager system”, a truly dictatorial system serving only the corporations. The appellants have made a compelling record that the law’s application is targeting communities of color, primarily African American. Whether the Federal judicial system will side with the state of Michigan and the corporations or with the people remains to be seen.
The people of Michigan, once a heavy industrial state, are facing a double whammy: massive unemployment and under employment in jobs where we barely survive. To top it off, we have to fight off the dictatorial emergency manager laws that are driving us further into poverty, “stealing” our pensions, gutting public education, cutting health care, poisoning and cutting off water to tens of thousands. This is the context in which Michigan residents boarded busses and packed the Cincinnati courtroom to hear the people’s case argued.
In the course of the struggle, leaders in Michigan who challenge the law’s impact on the people have been targeted by the judicial system. The corporations don’t want resistance to their outright theft of public property. Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, MI has been imprisoned for challenging Whirlpool’s corporate vision for the area. Marian Kramer and Rev. Bill Kellerman, charged with obstructing Detroit’s massive water shut offs in 2014, are in legal limbo. The Judge refused to let the jury render a decision, while charges remain. More recently, a Flint judge, while sentencing Gertrude Marshall for an altercation with a security guard, who snatched a bullhorn out of her hand during a water protest, compared her actions to what happened in Dallas where five police officers were killed.
The significance of the Federal appeals case is that it connects the dots, tying the many struggles directly to the Emergency Manager law. It makes clear that our fight is with the State as it merges with the corporations. Michigan is a template for what is sure to become national.
