Michigan Attorney General has a long history of being on the wrong side of issues that matter most to the citizens of our state, something I have documented extensively here at Eclectablog (HERE and HERE, for example.) This week, he’s back in the news with more of his hypocrisy and wrong-headedness. First, Schuette issued a press release saying that he’s […]

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is clearly not a man who ever concedes he has made a mistake. After his privatizing of state prison food services went horribly awry with Aramark employees having sex with prisoners, bringing in drugs, and the many and repeated cases of vermin in food, he finally fired them. You would think he’d admit it was a […]

Earlier this week, former Michigan state legislator Jason Allen told UP Matters reporter Brittany Denny that he is “troubled” by the recent reports of disabled veterans in the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans suffering under the atrociously inadequate care provided by J2S Group. J2S Group is the for-profit healthcare corporation that was the beneficiary of Gov. Snyder’s privatization scheme that […]

NOTE: Big tip o’ the Eclectahat to Eclectablog reader D. Harvey D. who provided much of the background research and perspective for this post. I’ve already written about the scandal involving the mistreatment of elderly disabled veterans at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans. A report released by the State Office of the Auditor General detailed a scathing laundry list […]

Back in 2011, reports began to emerge that conditions in the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans had deteriorated after part of the staff had been privatized. According to reporting by The Detroit News, “contract workers [were] responsible for incidents in which a veteran suffered a broken neck as a result of improper lifting procedures and another veteran had a gastric […]

Crain’s is reporting that, buried in Governor Rick Snyder’s budget proposal is a section that will shift public funding and delivery of mental health services to private corporations. The move is being fought by patient advocates and the Michigan Association of Community Mental Health Boards. Gov. Rick Snyder’s $54.9 billion fiscal 2017 budget calls for privatizing the $2.4 billion public […]

The primary justification for Emergency Financial Managers or Emergency Managers in Michigan from the very earliest iterations (and continuing through to today) is that some cities and school districts were just too full of corruption and ineptitude and that the state needed to swoop in and save the day. However, this easy answer has turned out not have been the […]

Once upon a time, Michigan prison kitchens were run by state personnel. Because of this, the kitchens were excused from what was seen as redundant inspections by another government agency. However, with Gov. Snyder’s ongoing experiment in outsourcing and privatizing every government service that he possibly can, our prison kitchens are now run by private, for-profit corporations that are beholden […]

3,707. That’s how many reported issues were found relating to the for-profit private prison food vendor Aramark in just an 8-month period. A new report from Progress Michigan shows just how widespread the problems were and, just as important, the utter failure of the Snyder administration to correct them. After reviewing over 25,000 pages of emails between the Department of […]

After scandal after scandal (after scandal after scandal), the Michigan Department of Corrections While the Detroit Free Press takes a victory lap for this development, the true heroes were Progress Michigan who tenaciously kept the story in the news including spending the money needed to procure thousands of pages of documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. Here’s Progress Michigan’s […]

Another day, another scandal for Aramark, the food vendor for prisons in Michigan. With each new scandal, Gov. Rick Snyder’s dogged persistence in continuing to outsource this state government service to a private, for-profit company is called deeper and deeper into question. This time, maggots were found in potatoes in a kitchen at the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility near […]