Linette, upon arriving home after a trip to Heritage Fest with the kids this past weekend, mentioned to me that a man had approached her, asking her to sign a petition. The petition, he told her, would put legislation on the ballot that would somehow help rebuild Michigan’s roads. As she didn’t have time to read it, she didn’t sign, but she mentioned it to me, knowing that I’d be interested, and I began asking around. And here’s what I discovered. The petition in question had nothing to do with our roads, and everything to do with repealing Michigan’s prevailing wage law, which dictates that individuals hired to work on government-funded construction projects within the state be paid union-scale wages and given similar benefits.
Bob Krzewinski, who apparently exchanged words with the men gathering signatures outside Heritage Fest, shared the following.
I found out the “Ypsilanti” petitioners were from California… When nobody was around, they were heard to call people living in our state, “a bunch of dumb-asses”… They really became agitated when I began telling potential petition-signers that the solicitors were being paid, were from out of state, and were outright lying to people about their petition.
If you looked at the petition, you’d see, at the bottom, it said “Protecting Michigan Taxpayers,” which is a front group funded by Amway’s DeVos family and construction agency trade groups.
Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, as of a month or so ago, had raised $1 million in order to wage their fight to repeal of Michigan’s prevailing wage law, with $372,200 of that coming from the DeVos family’s benign-sounding Michigan Freedom Fund, and another $348,000 coming from the Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan, a Lansing-based trade group that primarily represents nonunion contractors. The following comes from Crain’s Detroit Business.
…Protecting Michigan Taxpayers has until late November to collect close to 253,000 signatures to force the Legislature to vote on repealing Michigan’s 50-year-old prevailing wage law or put the issue before voters in November 2016.
If it passes the Legislature or by popular vote, Gov. Rick Snyder could not veto the legislation.
Michigan’s prevailing wage law requires contractors to pay union-scale wages and benefits on state-funded building projects. Supporters of the law say prevailing wages keep out-of-state contractors from undercutting Michigan companies with deliberately low bids and protects skilled-trades training programs…
It’s been reported that $338,000 of the $1 million raised to “protect” us Michigan taxpayers against living wages, has gone to an entity called Silver Bullet LLC, a Las Vegas-based political campaign firm contracted to help with the collection of signatures.
Silver Bullet LLC, for what it’s worth, claims their people have been trained to follow “a code of professional ethics” that would not allow them to misrepresent the causes for which they are collecting signatures, in spite of the fact that they’re likely compensated based on the number of signatures they submit each day. Here, with details, is a clip from their website.
[Please join me in printing this out and carrying it with you, in case you encounter an employee of Silver Bullet LLC.]
According to polling, Michiganders support the prevailing wage law. And even our Republican Governor has said that, if a bill crossed his desk to repeal it, he’d veto it. And the Republican legislature has conceded that they don’t have the two-thirds majority they’d need to override such a veto. Which is why this petition campaign is so diabolically brilliant. According to our state law, if legislation is “initiated or adopted by the people,” it cannot be overridden by veto. And that’s why, according to the Detroit Free Press, “some of the same players behind the successful campaign to make Michigan a right-to-work state in 2012 are pumping big money into an anti-prevailing-wage petition drive.” And all it takes is the support of just 3% of Michigan’s voting-age population to make it happen, which is why they’re fighting so hard to get these 252,000 signatures… If they can get that many, the Republican majority in the legislature can repeal the measure, and not even Snyder can stop it from happening.
So, not only are they lying about what this petition is for, but they’re also being disingenuous when they say that your signature will just help get the measure on the ballot so that the people of Michigan can vote on it. That isn’t the intention at all. As Ypsi City Council’s Pete Murdock explained it to me, “The Senate has already passed it and the House has the votes to pass it.” The thing is, they need for it to be veto-proof, and that’s what your signature, assuming you sign, is giving them. Once they have their 252,000 signatures, according to Murdock, “They can either adopt it as is, or place it on the ballot, and they fully intend to pass it as is.” So it will never be on a ballot. It will just become law. And more of Michigan’s workers will slide further into the economic abyss.
So, when you see these out-of-state operatives of the “electoral-industrial complex” standing outside of Kroger’s and Meijer’s, where I’m told they’ve set up shop in our area, be sure to call them out on what they’re doing, and interrupt any conversations they may be having with others. This isn’t about fixing our roads. And it certainly isn’t about getting this measure in front of Michigan voters. This is about making unpopular legislation veto-proof, and further diminishing the power of workers in the state of Michigan.
[If you’re interested, you can read the actual petition language here.]
If we hadn’t killed the Shadow Art Fair, this is what it would have become
Thank you, Banksy, for keeping the dream alive with Dismaland.
And, no, I don’t really think that my Shadow Art friends and I could have pulled off anything this ambitious. I do think, however, that this was the direction in which we were trending… dark social commentary.
I recall several meetings, for instance, where we debated whether or not to set up pet euthanasia stations so that people could easily dispose of their no-longer-young-and-cute pets. And there was talk of a small glass booth in the middle of the room where guests could take turns locking themselves in with someone smoking synthetic cannabis, the drug that apparently makes people want to eat the faces off of one another. There were other ideas too. I seem to recall something about wanting to sell deep fried pork sludge on a stick, and a factory farm petting zoo. And we seriously discussed having face-painters who, regardless of what children asked for, would only apply Hitler mustaches… But Banksy and his collaborators did it better. It’s like the Black Mirror of theme parks. Very smart. Aggressively thought provoking.
Here’s video of Dismaland.