Disenfranchising Democracy

Think what the Corporatocracy is doing to Detroit can't happen in your state?  To your town?

Not forty years ago, Detroit was arguably the most powerful city on the continent. Headquarters of the three richest and biggest manufacturing companies in the world, home of the most popular music in the world, center of the strongest unions in the world, location of some of the richest suburbs in the world, stronghold of the most powerful political party in the world.: who could ever have imagined that barely a generation later it would be at the mercy of a pissant, Koch-sucking, cowardly repug worm like Rick Snyder?

John Nichols at The Nation:

But what happens when elections are held but those who are elected are not allowed to govern? Can we tell ourselves that democracy has been maintained if it is not respected in any realistic sense by state and federal officials?
That’s a question that the voters of one of America’s great cities, Detroit, are in the process of answering.

Detroit voters trooped to the polls Tuesday to nominate candidates for the city’s top posts in one of the more unsettled—and unsettling—elections in American history.

The voters selected candidates for mayor, city clerk and the city council—all the officials who normally would guide the affairs of one of America’s largest municipalities.

The chosen candidates are running serious campaigns. They will compete in traditional fall contests, with some elected and some defeated. The winners will take office shortly after the election results are certified.

And, then, the new leaders of Detroit will in all likelihood be forced to sit in official chambers and watch as their city is dismantled by an appointed—not elected—"emergency manager" and a federal bankruptcy judge.

They will not do so willingly. The candidates that initial returns suggest Detroit voters have nominated to replace outgoing Mayor Dave Bing—Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon and, with a surge of write-in votes being counted for him, former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan—have made it clear that they are ready and willing to govern. Summing up the sentiments of most Detroit candidates this year, Napoleon, a former Detroit Police Chief, says that “the mayor should be able to set the priorities."

But that won’t happen because Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has taken control of Detroit, using an “emergency manager” law that he cobbled together late last fall.

SNIP

The new mayor and the new city council will not have the authority to “check and balance” the emergency manager—or to guide the process that Watson argues “has clearly been crafted in a right-wing playbook to seize assets, dismember electorate voting powers, dismantle unions and the families/neighborhoods supported by union jobs, disable local elected officials, smear and tarnish the image and viability of Black elected leadership, and broadly claim that the legacy costs related to retiree pensions are largely to blame for the city’s debt crisis.”

Watson’s frustration is real. And appropriate.

Detroit’s greatest challenge has not been municipal governance. It has been deindustrialization, which has shuttered hundreds of factories and left hundreds of thousands of city residents unemployed or underemployed. And that great challenge extends beyond Detroit.

Too many American cities face financial challenges similar to those that have destabilized Detroit. Snyder’s anti-democratic "answer" could well become the model for a response to those challenges that begins by blaming the victims and ultimately denies them a full and effective franchise.

“I believe Detroit and Michigan are ‘test cases’ for certain right-wing agents who want to do all they can to control future elections for this nation’s highest office and other posts,” says Watson. “Voter suppression, including the Supreme Court’s role in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are not incidental to the myriad of malevolence in Michigan.”

There is a lot more at stake in Detroit, and in Michigan, than one city’s balance sheet.

Our understanding of democracy, itself, is being subverted.

Are you really so sure that there is not a wannabe governor in your state legislature or maybe the Chamber of Commerce casting covetous eyes on your prosperous town and figuring if it could happen to Detroit, why not to your town?