The article was no doubt a response to the growing concern by people who live in Barry County and those who are friends of Circle Pines in the Yankee Springs area over the issue of fracking that could become a reality in the not too distant future.

In fact, at last week’s anti-fracking protest in Lansing, there were several people from Barry County and a few people connected to Circle Pines who came to speak out against the DEQ auctioning of public land for possible oil & gas extraction.

The WMEAC bloggers acknowledge that the land sold in the public auction could allow hydraulic fracking, but then cites the President of Miller Energy Company as saying he doesn’t think, “Yankee Springs will be a successful area for fracking.” Besides not citing any other sources on this matter, why use the President of Miller Energy Company, which has a long history of profiting from oil & gas extraction and a history of global expansion at one point in the company’s history?

The blog posting then provides a brief overview of the history of fracking in Michigan, but only uses the DEQ as a source on this history, particularly Director of the Office of Oil, Gas and Minerals for the Department of Environmental Quality, Hal Fitch. The Michigan DEQ has stated publicly that fracking is safe and for anyone who was at the public auction on Lansing last week, they would be hard pressed to trust anything that Hal Fitch had to say.

However, the most important aspect of the WMEAC blog post was their statement, “WMEAC is not yet ready to request a permanent moratorium on horizontal hydraulic fracturing.”

Instead of supporting a permanent moratorium, WMEAC states that it is supporting some proposed legislation that would “(1) place a moratorium on fracking for two years; (2) provide funding for a study to be done on Michigan fracking and its environmental implications; and (3) require fracking companies to publicly disclose the chemicals used in order to trace chemicals found in water and soil samples to specific companies and wells.”

However, the grassroots group Ban Michigan Fracking has a much more critical view of these legislative proposals.

“The package of bills is a sleight-of-hand, pro-regulatory approach to ensure that fracking for shale gas is labeled ‘safe’ and continues in Michigan,” says LuAnne Kozma of Ban Michigan Fracking. A bill calling for a moratorium is tied to a bill that would initiate a gas industry-funded study and fracking advisory committee, but not the other way around. In other words, the proposed fracking panel and study could go forward even without a moratorium. One of the bills’ key sponsors, state Representative Mark Meadows, revealed shortly after introducing the bills that he is opposed to a ban on fracking.”

The WMEAC blog piece ends with a list of 7 questions that “still need to be answered” about fracking in the Yankee Springs area. The most important of the 7 questions asked has to do with wanting to know what the environmental track record of the companies that purchased land during the public auction. This would indeed be important information as would any and all information that would provide complete transparency if any fracking were to take place.

What was interesting about the list of question was what was omitted. None of the questions asked had to do with how fracking would impact the eco-systems in the area, the wildlife, the soil and water table of the Yankee Springs area. There was also no question posed about how fracking could impact human health. Instead, several of the questions focused on how fracking would impact recreational activities, tourism and other area businesses.

These might be legitimate questions, but they should not take priority over the well being of human and non-human life in the eco-systems that make up the Yankee Springs area. 

One action will be a rally held in downtown Grand Rapids next week to Stop the War on Women. The rally is being organized and co-sponsored by Progressive Women’s Alliance of West Michigan, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, the National Organization For Women Greater Grand Rapids Chapter, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan Western Branch.

The promotional informational states, “Join us for a rally on May 24th to tell the world that women and men in Grand Rapids will NOT stand for the attacks on women by politicians in both parties.” This would be a refreshing departure from most events and actions in recent decades, which have often ended up being a mechanism of support for the Democratic Party.

We plan to attend the event and report on what is said and what additional actions are being planned after the rally that will really guarantee justice and equality for women.

Stop the War on Women Rally

Thursday, May 24

6:00 – 8:00PM

Rosa Parks Circle

Downtown Grand Rapids

This article is re-posted from OpenSecrets.org.

This week the House is debating the reauthorization of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, and there seems to be little danger of a relapse of the relative bipartisanship that occurred at the end of April, when the Senate approved its version of the bill.

By the time of that vote, 15 Republicans joined the entire Democratic caucus in passing the legislation, which is not to say that the two sides were singing in harmony from the start. And things are worse over on the other side of the Capitol.

Even before things got tense, 44 organizations were registered to lobby on the bill as of March 31 — including, somewhat unexpectedly, eight Native American tribes or groups working on their behalf and several immigration groups.

What the native Americans want, is to close what they call a jurisdictional gap that occurs when a non-Indian man assaults an Indian woman on reservation land. Tribal police have no authority in those circumstances under current law, and statistics show in a dramatic way that the feds rarely go forward with prosecutions. The Senate bill, as it was passed, would allow tribal authorities to intervene in such cases as long as they were misdemeanors, rather than felonies. But House language could leave tribal women worse off than they are under existing law, according to lobbyists for the tribes.

Most of the immigration groups supported Senate language that would preserve certain rights of undocumented women to call police, without fear of deportation, if they are being abused.

The House bill, under a package of amendments that its sponsor was expected to  introduce tonight, would make it harder for women to secure “U” visas, which were designed to encourage victims of serious crimes to come forward despite being undocumented.

“The House bill rolls back existing protections,” said Greg Chen, top lobbyist for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Lobbyists on the other side maintain that the current system lends itself to fraud, although there’s little statistical evidence to support that.

A vote in the House is expected on today.

The Reclaim the Streets (RTS) movement has been around since at least 1991, but by 1998 it had become a global forum of direct action.

The original Reclaim the Streets action was a way for people to reclaim streets from cars and other fossil fuel-based vehicles. People were becoming more aware of how deadly car culture had become and they wanted to resist the power that cars have in our communities by taking over busy roads and intersections to say, “the streets belong to people, not cars.”

By 1998, the Reclaim the Streets actions had evolved to include more than just resistance to cars, but as a way of protesting corporate globalization and capitalism. The hyper-commercialism of public space and the privatization of public space was alienating to a growing number of people, so the reclaiming of public space, like streets, was one way for people to say that “global capital does not rule us!”

Since 1998, people have used a reclaim the streets tactic as a way to draw attention to other forms of ecological destruction, to protest war, racism, police brutality, violence against women, hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community and discrimination directed at immigrants.

In fact, people began to use road intersections to talk about and creatively dramatize the intersectional nature of justice issues. People began to do street theater to draw attention to how ecological destruction disproportionately impacts women or to show how economic gentrification impacts communities of color and queer youth.

However, beyond using the streets as a forum to protest or dramatize an injustice, the Reclaim the Streets Movement has also been about the social and cultural importance of play and spontaneous celebration. For many people who have participated in a Reclaim the Streets action it has been exhilarating to just be able to be in the street without worrying about being hit by a car, to just dance, beat on a drum or embrace other humans who want to reclaim their humanity by reclaiming a road, a parking lot or street intersection.

How wonderful it is to see people talking in the streets, to see bicyclists, people on stilts, people in drag, people juggling, children using chalk to make images on the pavement, with music and dancing setting the tone for the action.

In 1998, over a million people took part in the Reclaim the Streets Global Day of Action. People took over streets in London, the Netherlands, Prague and Berkley, where 700 people reclaimed the streets.

On this day is resistance history, let us not only remember these kinds of actions……let’s continue to engage in them wherever we are!

The following video is from the 1998 Reclaim the Streets Action in London.

Several years ago I wrote a book about my experiences of doing solidarity work in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. After I completed the book I also produced a documentary film that was first screening in Grand Rapids in 2006.

The book is now online here at GRIID for those who are curious about the 20 years of working with Guatemalans in Grand Rapids and numerous trips to Central America as a human rights worker.

The book is entitled Sembramos, Comemos, Sembramos: Learning Solidarity on Mayan Time. The main title doesn’t translate well, but basically means we plant in order to eat in order to plant.

I first encountered this phrase from a Mayan farmer one morning as we were walking to a village to interview people who were brutalized by the Guatemalan military. He told us that this phrase represented the simple, yet profound cycle of life for most Mayans who lived off the land.

I was inspired by such a simple truth and I recount those kinds of experiences in the book in three sections. The first section is entitled Q’anjobal Mayans Invade Amway Territory. I share thoughts on being bit by the Central America bug, part of the Sanctuary movement in the 80′s and how I negotiated cultural solidarity in an area permeated with Christian conservatism.

Part II is called Sembramos, Comemos, Sembramos – We Plant, in order to Eat, in order to Plant. This is a saying I learned from a Mayan farmer that reflects the simplicity and consistency in the lives of the Mayans I met in Guatemala and Chiapas. Here I gleaned sections from my journal entrees from various trips between 1988 – 2005, where I have had numerous opportunities to accompany and observe the relentless persistence of the Guatemalan popular movements and the participatory democracy of the Zapatista communities. 

Part III, The Way You Live, Determines How We Live, is a collection of articles that I have written over the years on various aspects of how US policy impacts Guatemala and Chiapas and what we might do to change those policies. As Noam Chomsky has always pointed out, the responsibility of the citizens of countries that dictate global policies are key in determining the outcome of many liberation struggles around the world.

The film takes on a slightly different title, with Reversing the Missionary Position: Learning Solidarity on Mayan Time. It is an hour-long film that primarily covers my experiences in Guatemala and Chiapas doing human rights work. You can watch the trailer here or contact me at jsmith@griid.org to get a copy of the film.

A five-party, multi-million-dollar Michigan television ad campaign orchestrated by Mentzer Media Services illustrates the major role of nonprofit advocacy corporations in contemporary presidential politics.

Four nonprofits organized as 501(c)(4) corporations – Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, American Energy Alliance and the 60 Plus Association – have spent $3.4 million so far this year in a steady barrage of campaign-style ads criticizing the Obama administration for its energy and health care policies. Because of their timing, the ads do not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the sponsoring nonprofit corporations are not required to disclose their donors.

The SuperPAC Restore Our Future, which Mitt Romney has referred to as, “my SuperPAC,” is spending an additional $589,000 on TV in Michigan this month, extolling Romney’s virtues as a caring corporate executive. As a SuperPAC, Restore Our Future will report its donors and its spending to the FEC.

The data on the advertising were compiled by the nonpartisan Michigan Campaign Finance Network from the public political files of Michigan broadcasters and cable systems. All figures are gross sales.

Americans for Prosperity began the Mentzer advertising campaign in January, spending $670,000 and stopping its ads just before the 30-day reporting window for the Michigan presidential primary began. Advertisements that feature the name or image of a candidate and run within 30 days prior to a primary election must be reported to the FEC as electioneering communications.

The day after the Michigan presidential primary, American Future Fund began a two-week $706,000 ad blitz. That was followed by two weeks of ads sponsored by 60 Plus Association for $802,000; then two weeks of ads sponsored by American Energy Alliance for $488,000. After a two-week hiatus in April, Americans for Prosperity began a new two-week flight of ads that was overlapped first by American Future Fund, then by Restore Our Future.

As data were being collected by MCFN on May 11th, American Future Fund and Americans for Prosperity were placing new ad buys. Spending for those ads is not included in this report.

All the fore-mentioned advertising was created by Mentzer Media Services. In addition, Mentzer was the agency for Restore Our Future’s $2.2 million Michigan TV ad blitz in the weeks immediately preceding the Michigan presidential primary.

“This Mentzer-orchestrated campaign is exploiting the inadequacy of federal campaign disclosure rules,” said Rich Robinson of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. “We are in the midst of the endless presidential campaign, but these corporations’ spending doesn’t have to be reported because year-long campaigns were not contemplated when the rules for reporting electioneering communications were developed.
“An additional benefit to the corporations is that they retain their 501(c)(4) tax status, and the right to provide anonymity to their donors, because their spring and summer advertising is not acknowledged to be electioneering,” Robinson said. “Since they are allowed to deny that their advertising is electioneering, they can say that their main purpose as organizations is not electioneering.”

Organizations whose main purpose is electioneering are classified as 527 committees. 527 committees must disclose their spending and their donors.

MCFN will report periodically throughout 2012 on campaign advertising that is not disclosed to the FEC.

C4G MIA in 6th CD; Chambers, Chemistry Council support Upton

Earlier this year the anti-tax Club for Growth announced that it would challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. Fred Upton in his campaign for reelection in Michigan’s redesigned 6th Congressional District. So far that challenge hasn’t amounted to much: A modest $6,000 cable TV ad buy.

The Club’s ads were answered initially by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. The state and national Chambers spent $128,000 for television spots touting Upton’s service.

The U.S. Chamber and the American Chemistry Council are in the midst of a new three-week TV ad campaign praising Upton. The Chemistry Council is spending $240,000 and the U.S. Chamber is spending $118,000 in the Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo media market.

While Club for Growth has a demonstrated capacity to mobilize large sums of money in a hurry, the business establishment has signaled that it will not surrender the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to the radical fringe of the Republican Party for a low cost.

DIBC ad campaign totals $1.6 million in 2012

The Detroit International Bridge Company resumed its advertising against a new public-private bridge between Detroit and Windsor in March, after a pause that avoided the escalation in ad rates at the time of the February presidential primary.

From Christmas until early February, the DIBC spent $728,000 for its ads. From late March through May 7th, DIBC spent $877,000, bringing its 2012 total to $1.6 million.

DIBC spent more than $6 million for TV ads in 2011 and succeeded in killing the enabling legislation for a new bridge in the Senate Economic Development Committee.

Undisclosed presidential issue ads, through 5/10/2012

In anticipation of police repression at the anti-NATO protests in Chicago starting this weekend, FreePress is asking people to sign on to this letter to send a message on the rights of free speech and freedom of the press.

Since September, police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists around the country for the “crime” of trying to document political protests in public spaces.

People with smartphones and cameras are changing the way we record and share breaking news. In return, police have targeted, harassed — and in many cases, arrested — those trying to bear witness.

Whether you’re a credentialed journalist, a protester or a bystander with a camera, you are guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of access to information. In the digital age, these freedoms mean that we all have the right to record.

Free Press and a coalition of free speech and digital rights groups have sent a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department to defend this right.

We are inviting you to sign on to this letter.

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).  In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.

Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of responses to its FOIA filing is one from the NOC Fusion Center Desk dated Nov. 5, 2011, which collects at the federal level and then distributes the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders.  Although none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information were widely disseminated by the DHS.

Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS, the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers around the US.

Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression.

Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would “reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist. Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law enforcement, intelligence and military network.

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists, it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy actions.

These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:

Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants — the Federal Protective Service (FPS) will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.

There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS “background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)

The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out lie:

DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.

Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.

The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.

The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the “We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.

To see all the new FOIA documents, go to the PJIF website.

Comparatively, the other candidates (10 in all) who are challenging Stabenow have raised collectively less than $5 million, with former Congressman Pete Hoekstra the closest with $2,701,341.

Hoekstra and Clark Durant, the top challengers to Stabenow are receiving funds from companies that have clear agendas, such as Bank of America (has given $14,750 to Durant) and Amway, which has given Hoekstra $18,800 to date.

The insidious nature of companies like Amway and Bank of America make it easy for those stuck in a right/left dichotomy to say this is why people should re-elect Stabenow, since she is not as tied to corrupt, money grabbing corporations as her opponents are.

However, a closer look at Senator Stabenow’s contributors would make it clear to any free-thinking person that her allegiance is to the same capitalist class.

At the top of the list of entities donating to Stabenow’s re-election campaign is Emily’s List, a political action committee that gives money to Pro-Choice Democrats. The rest of the list is much less ideologically driven or one-issue driven and clearly represents corporate America.

These companies essentially represent who Senator Stabenow will be accountable to, since they are the ones providing the bulk of the funds necessary for her to get re-elected.

There are those entities from the financial sector, that not only engaged in fraudulent behavior that led to the 2008 financial crash, they are also entities that were bailed out by US taxpayers and continue to benefit from any real government regulation.

JP Morgan Chase is primarily backing incumbents this year, since it has been clear that the current members of both the House and the Senate support the current financial status quo. The same is the case for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanely, like JP Morgan Chase, are primarily backing incumbents.

The list of major donors to Senator Stabenow also includes health insurance giant Blue Cross/Blue Shield and “we don’t pay any corporate taxes” poster-child, General Electric.

The rest of the list is mostly made up of Michigan-based corporations, which reflects whose interests Stabenow defends in Washington – companies such as DTE Energy, Dow Chemical, GM and the Ford Motor Company. These are companies, which were major contributors to Senator Stabenow in 2006 and 2000, which is further evidence of her allegiance to the capitalist class.

According to the Protect Our Jobs site:

“For more than a year, Lansing politicians and corporate special interests have made one attack after another on Michigan workers: cutting middle-class families’ wages, health care benefits, retirement security and safety protections. They’re not done yet — there are more than 80 bills waiting for a vote in the state Legislature that would strip basic protections from working people.”

Last week, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce formally came out against such an effort with their own rhetoric about what would be good for the state’s economy.

The Chamber’s Press Release on the Protect Our Jobs campaign states in part:

“This anti-taxpayer petition drive is squarely aimed at repealing dozens and dozens of cost-saving reform measures recently enacted by Gov. Snyder and the Michigan Legislature,” noted Jim Holcomb, Senior Vice President, Business Advocacy & General Counsel for the Michigan Chamber. “Across the nation, Michigan is increasingly being recognized as a leader in government efficiency and reform for enacting common sense solutions to government spending, but this proposal is a power grab by government employee unions who want to maintain the status quo without regard for the Michigan taxpayers footing the bill.”

“The Michigan Chamber doesn’t currently have a position for or against right-to-work,” Holcomb added. “However, the idea that a special interest group would amend the state constitution to cut off debate about legislation it doesn’t like is unfair and unwise.”

These last two sentences are interesting and worth looking at. While it is true that the Michigan Chamber of Commerce has not taken a strong public stand on the issue of making Michigan a Right to Work state, several local Michigan Chambers have come out in favor.

The Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce created a lobbying entity known as the West Michigan Policy Forum, which makes as one of its stated goals the implementation of Right to Work laws in Michigan. At their 2010 Summit, the West Michigan Policy Forum made Right to Work a key goal and even brought anti-union PR strategist Rick Berman to present on how to change public opinion about Right to Work.

The Michigan Chamber President Rich Studley concluded in the Press Release:

“Government employee unions have declared war on our state’s economic competitiveness with this deceptive and counterproductive ballot proposal. Michigan’s job providers did not ask for this fight. But we will do whatever it takes to defeat the union’s plan to stop reinventing Michigan.”

It seems pretty clear that with these words that there is a class war going on in Michigan. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce and groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy have made it clear that profits are valued over working people in Michigan.

The ballot initiative by many labor groups in Michigan may not be the best response to challenge the power of capital, but it has clearly exposed the class war that capitalists continue to wage against working people.