The Great Orange Smoke Screen The front pages of any major news outlet, online or otherwise, are full of news of Donald Trump and the corrupt, inept-yet-frighteningly-effective cabal of criminals that make up his administration and circle of advisors. Nearly 40 people tied to him, his administration, his inauguration, and his campaign have been indicted and more are sure to […]

With the bombshell news yesterday that two former Flint Emergency Managers are being charged with felonies in their connection to the ongoing tragedy known as the Flint water crisis, the calls to repeal Michigan’s anti-democratic “financial martial law” are rising again from around the state. The corporatists that see Emergency Management as a key to accomplishing their dual goals of […]

Oh, look. The corporate front group Mackinac Center wants to convert all Detroit Public Schools (DPS) to charter schools. This, they tell us would be “the best safeguard” and would “allow many independent charter school operators to try varying models for converted DPS schools.” In other words, they once again want to experiment with Detroit school children. In Highland Park, […]

I recently wrote about Michigan teacher Mary Davenport, a woman who had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from her union, the Michigan Education Association (MEA), only to turn around and claim they “weren’t there when she needed them.” She was duped into being the poster child for the campaign by the corporate front group Mackinac Center to […]

Each summer, the corporatist front group Mackinac Center for Public Policy funds a massive effort to convince teachers that they are better off without their union and that they should leave it. While complaining that unions are somehow getting rich off taxpayer dollars, the Mackinac Center uses the public schools email system to disseminate their anti-union propaganda at taxpayer expense. […]

The anti-union, anti-teacher corporatist group Mackinac Center for Public Policy has a long history of promoting the demise of teachers unions and public schools. They prefer a world where children are taught by non-unionized teachers in charter schools that profit from our tax dollars. Which is why it’s bizarre to the point of being Orwellian that they have granted $1 […]

This past weekend, newly-elected extremist tea partiers Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat held “The Powwow”, a gathering of tea partiers with the subtitle, “Going on the Offense”. Given the line-up, “offense” (as in “offensive”) was the operative word in the title, of course. Courser and Gamrat, who recently released their Manifesto designed to turn Michigan into a theocracy, invited notorious […]

The Koch brothers are in the news a lot these days. Yeah, they are written about IN news stories, of course. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The Koch brothers are in the news by actually creating the news in a way that promotes their own corporatist ideology that anything that is good for private corporations is good. Period. […]

Most of the time, when I read stuff slithering out of the Mackinac Center’s propaganda arm Michigan Capitol Confidential, I just shrug it off with a Reaganesque, “there they go again”. But every once in a while their effluvium is so nonsensical that it makes me read and reread it again to make sure that it isn’t something coming from […]

After losing in court countless times, the corporatist front group Mackinac Center has finally won a round. This week, an administrative law judge ruled that the Michigan Education Association (MEA) teachers union must end its decades-old policy of having an “opt-out month” and allow its members to leave at any time. The judge’s ruling is essentially a recommendation to the […]

Despite the success of groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN) and their affiliates, and other related anti-union corporate front groups in making states like Michigan so-called “Right to Work” states, these same groups are having far less success in actually getting people to leave their unions. In Michigan, for example, only around 1% […]