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Now welcome to the award winning BestofAlife podcast with clips today from Jim Heightower, the Rachel Maddo show, Democracy Now, Melissa Harris Perry and the Majority Report.

However, today's episode is a little different than usual since the origin of today's story go all the way back to 2011, I figured that's where we would also start.

So Jim Heightower originally wrote and recorded this first clip way back in August of 2011.

If Rich Snyder ever comes to help you, run away as fast and as far as you can. Snyder is the right-wing corporate hugging governor of Michigan, whose extremist anti-worker, anti-government agenda was handed to him by a Coke-funded front group named the Maconaw Center.

The new law included in the package was a doozy of autocratic mischief making called the Local Government Fiscal Accountability Act.

The new law turned Snyder into a perverse hybrid of a Soviet czar and a ten horn banana republic potentate and it has infuriated the public.

Now trying to backpedal the governor's new line is that it's about helping communities.

Helping? This law allows him to seize control of any city, county, school district, etc. that he decides is in fiscal trouble, authorizing him to a point an emergency manager which may be a private corporation to run the entity.

This autocratic region is empowered to cancel labor contracts, repeal the public budget, privatize government assets, dismiss elected officials and even dissolve the local entity.

This is the kind of help that a fox brings to the hen house. So the governor is now being sued by his own astonished citizenry.

Snyder's tyrannical law, they point out, violates the state's constitution by usurping the right of local residents to elect their officials.

As the director of a community legal group in Detroit puts it, the governor's designated emergency manager would control all, including the right to enact or repeal local ordinances.

This is Jim Heiter saying, you might be thinking, thank goodness I don't live in Michigan, but if Snyder's anti-democratic coup succeeds there, you can bet that various copeback right wing front groups will bring the Michigan model to your state.

For information on the Michigan fight, contact Detroit's Sugar Law Center at www.sugarlaw.org.

From the war against disorder, from sirens made in day, from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay, the democracy is coming.

Today you will stay.

Okay, now we're going to fast forward just a bit. Rachel Maddo was all over this story from the very beginning as well. Skipping ahead just eight months, this clip is from her from April 2012.

News from the great state of Michigan tonight where we have been reporting on a drive to overturn one of the most radical new laws in the country.

In its current form, the one passed by Republicans last year, Michigan's emergency manager law lets the state take over cities and school districts, the state overwool the choices made by local elections, and instead hands authority over to a single, unelected overseer who gets unilateral control.

An emergency manager can sell off the town's property, can cancel the contracts, they can move to dissolve the town, they get to say how much power the local elected officials retain.

The emergency manager wants, he or she can take that power, can take all the power from local elected officials and never mind who the voters pick to represent them. Democracy does not apply at the local level.

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