last week and asked them to review and monitor the republicans emergency overthrow the towns march through michigan. writing while the law itself may be mutual, it s being applied in a discriminatory fashion. the congress department has told him it is reviewing the law. it looks like they might get the citizens they need this month. republican governor rick schneider is considering a contingency plan, asking the legislator to pass the sort of emergency manager law 3.0 so he can keep taking over towns any way even if his last law was recalled. for now, the question in michigan is, who gets to have a local democracy? who is being allowed to be worthy to elect their own officials? should your vote matter even if the state doesn t like the decisions? should your vote count? this chart should rattle anyone who thinks about that. the emergency manager law, the one that he was willing to risk protests over. a new poll shows that reports over rick schneider has fallen
to replace all locally elected officials. under rick snyder s law, his state government can abolish whole michigan towns, take them over and declare them no more. doesn t matter who you elected to run your town, who you elected for mayor. governor snyder reserves the right to take it over. he did that in benton harbor, in michigan. he decided to overrule all local election results and install someone with unilateral personal authority to run benton harbor. benton harbor residents nevertheless voted this week. on tuesday, they voted down all seven of the ballot measures this emergency overseer guy just unilaterally on his own decided to put on the ballot. according to the residents votes, benton harbor elected a new mayor. those votes are all pretty much moot. they went out and went through the motions of voting. thanks to the emergency manager law, votes in that part of michigan don t have any effect anymore. local elections are overruled by the state. for your own good. so hey, bento
can be profitized and corpora corporati corporatized. reporter: when you talk about setting up public education as another stream of government funding that can be raided for public profit, there is one detail about the emergency manager law that always struck me that seemed important but i didn t quite get why. and that was that these emergency managers with the unilateral authority are allowed to take outside sources of income from other private companies, from other entities, while they are paid by the state to beconceivably, you can have people running the schools on behalf of the state who are also getting paid to take over the schools by private companies that could profit from them. you ve got it. it s one of the most insidious parts of it. i understand there may be a movement to try to repeal this law, and i hope it happens. and this has happened in other cases already. i think that this happened in detroit. so you don t know really what the influence is that they re
approach to democracy for hard times. the message from mr. jackson and from others today, organize and sue. joining us now is democratic state representative, fred durhall, chairman of the michigan legislative black caucus. he was at the press conference today in benton harbor. thank you for being here with us tonight, sir. appreciate your time. rachel, thank you very much for allowing us to come and talk with you today. clearly, you consider this emergency manager law to have constitutional problems, enough that you are getting ready to sue over it. can you describe for us the basis of this legal challenge? yes. we are looking at the u.s. constitution in article 1, section 10-1, which talks about contracts. it talks about the ability of the federal government to stop any state from being able to quash contracts. and that is important for this struggle, because what is going on is that you have an emergency
black lawmakers preparing to challenge michigan s new approach to democracy for hard times. the message from mr. jackson and from others today, organize and sue. joining us now is democratic state representative, fred durhall, chairman of the michigan legislative black caucus. he was at the press conference today in benton harbor. thank you for being here with us tonight, sir. appreciate your time. rachel, thank you very much for allowing us to come and talk with you today. clearly, you consider this emergency manager law to have constitutional problems, enough that you are getting ready to sue over it. can you describe for us the basis of this legal challenge? yes. we are looking at the u.s. constitution in article 1, section 10-1, which talks about contracts. it talks about the ability of the federal government to stop any state from being able to squash contracts. and that is important for this