If You Seek a Fascist Peninsula . . .

Republicans in Michigan rolled back 75 years of progress in workers' rights when the state legislature passed - and Governor Rick Snyder signed - legislation allowing workers to opt out of paying union dues at unionized work shops, essentially making Michigan, the place where the modern labor movement was born, a right-to-work state.  It was passed by a lame-duck Republican legislature without any proper hearings in an effort to get it done before a new legislature with more Democratic seats takes over in January.  Governor Snyder said that demonstrations over the legislation - many of them against it - encouraged him to sign the legislation right way.  In other words, he displayed leadership by ignoring people as quickly as possible.  (Anyone notice that heavily armed state police contingent at the demonstrations outside the state Capitol in Lansing?)

Snyder defended the legislation as benefiting workers who don't wish to join a union and makes Michigan more competitive in attracting companies to the state.  What it really does is weaken unions and collective bargaining rights - not to mention the most reliable source of support for Democrats - and the only competitiveness it encourages is seeing whether Michigan can bring in more companies that want to maximize profits and exploit workers for their own benefit than other states.  While it may not have a deep impact on the state's unionized auto workers (General Motors opposed the legislation, calling it disruptive) and may even get unions more engaged in the fight for their survival, the short-term prognosis is for unions to decline in influence even further.

Meanwhile, Republicans have tightened their grip on power in the Wolverine State.  Michigan, of course, is where there was an emergency manager law passed, allowing the state to take over a whole municipality and cast aside the elected mayor and council if the municipality was believed to be in danger of insolvency.  The emergency manager was unelected, and did not have to answer to the residents.  The law was rejected in a referendum, but the legislature is set to pass a replacement emergency manager bill that includes appropriations for the managers. Laws with appropriations cannot be repealed through referendum in Michigan.  Money is appropriated as part of the right-to-work legislation for its own implementation. The state's Republicans are also working on legislation making recall elections more difficulty to hold and making abortions more difficult to have.

The state's progressive activists are predicting a period of "doom and gloom" in Michigan.  Such doom and gloom, I suppose, could adversely affect Detroit.

And we'd hate for that to happen.