Half of Michigan blacks potentially disenfranchised by GOP war on Democracy

>>> we have reported on this show about michigan a lot, specifically, about stuff that republicans are doing in michigan that nobody else is even trying to get away with anywhere else in the country. in what is one of the most radical things being done by republicans in any state government , michigan republicans have been abolishing democracy at the local level, overriding local election results to get rid of your locally elected officials , and instead having your town run by fiat without voting by an emergency manager installed by the government. the emergency manager can fire everyone you elected to represent you, can abolish contracts, sell off, or give away your town's property. he or she can even abolish your town on his or her own say-so without getting a vote. protest, get mad, you are not living in a democracy anymore, not at the local level. there used to be a normal emergency manager law, but rick snyder fed it steroids and turned it into something that no republicans anywhere in the country have even tried to get away with. the premise of the emergency manager law is that democracy is part of the problem. in order to fix a city or a school district you first have to take away people's ability to vote for what they want and who they want representing them. the democracy thing is a problem, and it needs to be got around in order to fix things. so say republicans in michigan . michigan voters, however, disagree. michigan voters collected enough signatures to force a referendum on rick snyder 's law. in november, they repealed it by a big margin. 52 days later, rick snyder just signed a new one. republicans in the state legislature passed it. rick snyder signed it, and this time they did it in a way that can probably not be peeled. because neener, neener. his michigan reported that they consider detroit to be an emergency state . and thanks to that emergency manager law that rick snyder signed after people repealed the old one, this emergency declaration means the governor gets to decide now whether or not to overrule local democracy in detroit . he gets to decide whether he'll install somebody to run the city without all that interference from that pesky voting stuff. one local democratic activist in michigan , chris savage started charting the effect of this emergency manager law in his state, started looking at the places that had their democracy taken away from them at the local level. chris savage started charting it at his website, ecollectablog where he noted if you consider the african-american population of michigan and consider the racial makeup of the towns where michigan state government has decided to take away local democracy , all of these towns, the relatively small ones like benton harbor on lake michigan or allen park , ecorse, add inmont yak, flint, and now finally potentially add in detroit itself, since they're considering taking over detroit , you add all those places up and what you get is a michigan that is on the verge of eliminating local democracy for almost half of the black people who live in that state. for almost half the african-americans who live in the realm of rick snyder . quoting chris savage, if detroit gets an emergency manager , 49% of the african-american in michigan will live in cities where their elected officials have been replaced by a single state-appointed ruler. you can not say that michigan republicans meant to do this. you cannot say they intended to render the votes of half the state's african-americans meaningless, but with this decision pending in detroit , that is what they are now on the road to doing. people ask me why i am obsessed with michigan republicans . this is why i am obsessed with michigan