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Wednesday, December 12,2012

Right to Work Just Part of Michigan's Big Turn Right

by Kyle Melinn
Sorry, Democrats. 

Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican elves in the legislature are leaving no presents under your tree this Christmas. 

The way things are shaking out this lame duck, the GOP gang is more prone to pull a Grinch — shoving the tree, the trimmings and the roast beast back up the chimney to be piled into a sleigh thatīs shoved over a cliff.

Itīs just not right to work. The ultimate political assault on organized labor and Democrats aside, Snyder & friends are gearing up a Christmas list chocked full of goodies for their business buddies, Bible-hugging conservatives and Tea Party subscribers.

We’re talking another big tax cut. Another try at emergency manager legislation. Guns in more places. More abortion regulations. More tinkering with struggling school districts.

Think tanks like the Center for Michigan and Michigan Future argue that bringing Michigan’s laws closer to other low-wage states like Mississippi, where the standard of living and the investment in quality of life public services is lower, chases away young talent looking for jobs in the knowledge-based economy. 

An agenda that disinvests from its people and public offerings makes Michigan a low-prosperity state, they argue.

The state’s politically minded business leaders, however, have a different vision. Emboldened by an Election Day that was good for Republicans in the places it mattered, party high-rollers Dick DeVos, Ron Weiser and their ideological soulmates have convinced lawmakers and Snyder that now is the time to clear the bucket list. 

Why put off the tough decisions when they’ll only get tougher over time?

Voters just turned down Proposal 2, organized labor’s collective bargaining ballot proposal, by 16 percentage points. Six Republican House members lost their re-election bids, giving them a free pass to vote conservative without any fear of political repercussions. The Supreme Court is arguably friendly to the cause.

Every day that goes by is another day closer to Nov. 4, 2014, and re-election day for Snyder and three-quarters of the state Senate, making any tough vote just a little bit tougher to pull off.

The Democrats? Why worry about them? Why bother working with them? As far as the Republicans are concerned, who needs them?

They fought the new Corporate Income Tax and the R’s other business friendly changes to project labor agreements, unemployment insurance reform, workers compensation and insurance premiums/benefit contributions for public workers.

Blasting through a blatantly partisan business and social agenda in the waning days of the 96th Legislature without them after advancing an aggressive business agenda in 2011 would seem automatic.

In numerous meetings since Nov. 6, labor begged Snyder, House Speaker Jase Bolger and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville for anything but right to work. 

But labor couldn’t sell its soul completely enough for Republicans. And right to work, et al., will be the result. 

The following is a breakdown of the menu of conservative red meat being force fed through the legislative meat grinder in lame duck — little, if any, of which the Democrats have the power to stop

1. Right to work — The literal and symbolic slap in the face to the birthplace of the organized labor movement, this policy gives workers the ability to stop paying union dues in union shops. This weakens labor’s leverage at the bargaining table while cutting off a percentage of funding to the union itself. That limits labor’s ability to assist their members and fund future Democratic political candidates.

2. Personal property tax repeal — The tax local governments are allowed to place on manufacturing equipment would go away under a plan being pushed by Lt. Gov. Brian Calley. The replacement funding mechanism isn’t 100 percent, though. That’s a problem for local governments, which claim to have swallowed more than $4 billion in state cuts for the last decade or so.

The complicated funding formula and local taxing assessment being created as a replacement aside, locals want full replacement. The Snyder administration claims there isn’t enough money in the budget for that.

3. New emergency manager law — Voters said they didn’t want P.A. 4, the state’s emergency manager law that gave these gubernatorial appointees the power to break union contracts in cash-strapped local governments and municipalities. 

But with Detroit teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Snyder is pushing a P.A. 4 alternative that would give the voters in these troubled areas the choice of four options: an emergency manager who can break union contracts; mediation; a binding consent agreement; or bankruptcy. 

4. Education Achievement Authority — Snyder used an interlocal agreement to create an authority to oversee Detroit’s struggling school district, which hasn’t been making the grade under any standard for years. Now, he wants to expand the EAA in statute for the state’s lowest performing schools, which would appear to include Lansing.

The rub is that existing teacher labor contracts in these schools would be thrown out the window and public school buildings could be sold or leased to charter schools without the OK of local officials. The degree of untested change being allowed to happen in these EAA-managed districts also have administrators concerned their students will be turned into “lab rats.”

5. Abortion clinic regulations — The last time a chamber took up a bill requiring stepped-up inspection and licensing of abortion clinics, Michigan made national news when Rep. Lisa Brown was censured for saying “vagina.”

These Right to Life- and the Michigan Catholic Conference-supported bills do more than say fetal remains can’t be tossed in a dumpster while screening out pregnant women being coerced into an abortion. They create a licensing and regulatory environment pro-choice activists are concerned are meant to shut down abortion clinics.

6. Concealed weapons — Forget about libraries. Gun owners who undergo the right amount of training can carry their concealed weapons into schools, churches, bars, daycares, college dorms, hospitals and stadiums under legislation that’s passed the Senate. New restrictions are being put on those who can open carry, but the net result would appear to be more guns in more places.

7. ‘Religious liberty and conscience’ — The final passage of legislation giving doctors and health facilities a legal out if they deny to a patient any procedure they morally object to isn’t as clear as the rest. This recycled legislation scores one-chamber victories periodically. Could this be the year it goes all the way?

8. Medical malpractice — Bills protecting doctors from enormous medical malpractice settlements create a tighter framework under which patients can sue. Despite being fought by the state’s trial lawyers, these bills being pushed by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman and physician Roger Kahn seem to have critical mass.

9. Gray wolf hunting — Upper Peninsula farmers are tired of their livestock disappearing in the middle of the night, so a bill giving the DNR the power to set a wolf hunting season is in the works. Environmentalists and Indian tribes are appalled that the once endangered species is moving into hunters’ crosshairs.

10. Election recall reform — You want to get rid of a legislator early for any of this stuff? Recalling a state representative is made harder under legislation that limits legislative recalls to a one-year window in the middle of the lawmaker’s two-year term. It also requires the reason for a recall to be “factual,” according to a county election commission.

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Like President Obama said I (we) won the election and voters new what I (we) stood for and the same holds true in Michigan, Republicans won the Governors Office and Legislature and voters knew what they stood for.\n\nI don\'t see where they have done anything illegal or any different than what Democrats have also done.\n\nViolence and threats of a Civil War does nothing yo enhance their position and in fact belittles it to many.
 
Sen. Casperson\'s proposed wolf season is asinine beyond belief. It actually stands a good chance of efficiently using wolves to cause considerable damage to the Upper Peninsula\'s deer herd.\n\nThe ignorance behind it is actually quite simple to understand. Wolves breed as groups, a litter to a pack as a rule, one they puritanically enforce. As a result you can, if needed, control their reproduction rate. If you decide you have \"X\" too many wolves you can carefully remove \"X\" wolves as whole packs, the smallest packs. that could give you, say, 30 packs averaging 10 members. 30 litters of pups in the spring. Or you could remove them from the largest packs, and have something like 50 litters averaging 6 or 60 averaging 5, and twice the birthrate.\n\nThis is where the proposed lottery and quota hunt get really surreal, where Porky crosses over into Wackyland. The hunt works exactly the opposite way as wolves\' natural control on their own numbers as an apex predator, adding non breeding wolves to a growing pack and excluding wolves from a similarly larger territory. Instead packs are randomly, about proportionally shrunk in by hunting, basically all tattered, but as many or more litters are born, 80, 90, 100 with the new packs added.\n\nAll you need to do to more than double the wolf reproduction rate of a big pack is kill two of them and free up enough territory for a pair to found a new breeding pack. just two more wolves in the area, but a whole second litter of pups for the area to feed. With the harvest scything pack members out yearly the population could shortly end up largely breeding pairs.\n\nIn deer management terms: Every wolf in a pack is, for management purposes a \"buck\", except two breeding \"does\" that are refractory, hard to get rid of. Other wolves just take their place. Removing wolves at random increases the birthrate, a litter born to a smaller pack with a smaller territory. Kill a couple \"bucks\" and you may free territory for a pair, new \"does\" to found a new pack nearby. With their litter you have doubled the number of pups born per adult in the area territory now split between two packs. A couple of does added. The wolves run a doe season on themselves to keep their numbers down and add non breeding \"bucks\". Right now wolves have had several generations to grow and develop their packs in Michigan, barring poaching - which is as self-defeating as Sen. Casperson\'s ultra-buck season by driving up wolf breeding.\n\nThere is no serious analysis whether the supposed management would have any of the effects desired, but shrinking wolf packs makes them more desperate in terms of needing to gather food for the pups. These pups need to eat all that food a pup needs to grow to full size. New pairs will be especially harried.\n\nEven if the flood of hungry wolves does not resort to human livestock, garbage, pets, etc the appetite of the wolf packs will be forced up. Pups and fawns are growing up at the same time.\n\nI happen to believe whitetail deer are evolved to take normal losses to predators. Are they adapted to having the number of wolf pups artificially raised several times?\n\nI also want to know the end game. Once wolf \"management\" has dug itself into its hole, is the plan to reduce adult wolves still more, or to tell deer hunters to leave the deer only to be fed to hungry wolves in the spring and residents to endure while the wolf packs restore themselves?\n\nThis year the actual count of deer taken in the Upper Peninsula - the one they use to figure the number of licenses and which - was up 10%, 5 times the state increase in license sales. Wolf populations have been growing by about 7% a year. Seems balanced to me. But noted wolf biologists have been reported as saying if we go the sport hunt route it will be necessary to kill up to 50% of the wolves each year.\n\nThose behind this hunt do not take wolf management seriously. Wolf packs give a powerful tool to manage by, as detailed above, or they can be used as a weapon against the deer population. Wielded by wolf hunters.
 
 
 
 
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