Comrade Snyder Voids Elected Officials Of Benton Harbor, Michigan

[MrScorpio]

A city, incidentally, with one of the largest African American populations in Western Michigan.

It won't be any time now before the "Financial Manager" that he appointed starts to liquidate and sell off the town's public assets to some gaggle of GOP cronies.

Welcome to the Union of Soviet Socialist Counties, formally known as the Great Lakes State. (And you can bet, dollars to doughnuts, that he's going to try and sell off the Great Lakes too).

Tea Party Michigan Governor Rick Snyder Adopts Soviet-style Authoritarian Powers Over Michigan Cities

We talked about Scott Walker's Orwellian rhetoric yesterday, but Michigan Tea Party Gov. Rick Snyder leaves Walker in the dust when it comes to turning the book "1984" into a reality.

Snyder recently signed a bill that gives him powers to unilaterally take over local governments by appointing "emergency financial managers" with near absolute powers to supersede decisions made by democratically elected officials.

If this strikes some as an example of the type of governmental tyranny that the Tea Party deplored (but never existed before in a state as far as we know), that is because it is.

The Tea Party - and the Republican Party - have shouted to the rooftops that local government and individual liberties are the true "patriotic" freedoms in America.

Yet, they elect a governor in Michigan who - as one of his first pieces of legislation - empowers himself to take those rights away, nullifying the will of the voters in a given town or city.

Snyder just made Orwellian Tea Party history when his appointed "emergency financial manager" for Benton Harbor, Michigan, prohibited elected officials of that city from making any decisions or otherwise carrying out their duties.

As an outraged Michigan blogger observes:

This is a complete disenfranchisement of an entire community, an entire city in my state. The voters are now denied the ability to be governed by the people they elected in a democratic election.

This is nothing short of an abridgment of democracy in raw form.

So where are the Tea Party's "Down With Tyranny" signs when you need them?

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12610