Progress Michigan blog posts.
This month, Consumers Energy – one of Michigan’s largest utility companies – announced that it was abandoning plans to build a new, expensive and dirty coal plant in Bay City, as well as idle seven other unneeded plants across the state. For Michigan residents and electric consumers, this is a great victory. But more importantly,…
Will Gov. Rick Snyder stand idly by while Michigan citizens are demonized by a Florida group of right-wing radicals? He will if he doesn’t hear from you. All-American Muslim, the TLC show depicting the lives of five Muslim families from Dearborn, provides an opportunity for viewers around the country to learn more about a culture…
Congressional Republicans just can’t get enough. They can’t get enough Big Oil giveaways. They can’t get enough handouts for their corporate friends. And they can’t get enough of your money. In fact, they’re using your money to get those things. Without any sense of shame, they’ve packed HR 3630 with handouts for Big Oil and…
Republicans in Congress are at it again. For the fifth time in two months Congressional Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to extend the payroll tax cut for 160 million working Americans and small business owners. Why? Because it asks the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share by including a tiny surtax on income – excluding…
Janice Daniels, the recently elected Tea Party Mayor of Troy, has been making headlines and attracting national attention to Southeast Michigan recently – but not in a good way. If only this were surprising – it comes at the end of a year when Lansing Republicans have pursued an extreme social agenda while pretending to…
Guest post by John Karebian, Executive Director of the Michigan Nurses Association. Cross-posted at Fight for Main Street. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right to work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the…
Lansing Republicans have quietly been working for months on a package of “education reform” bills that would undermine public education by allowing an unlimited number of for-profit charter and cyber schools to open and receive taxpayer funding. How radical are these proposals? Well, the Washington Post called them “Michigan’s embarrassing school reform legislation,” while the Huffington…
When the Mackinac Center for Public Policy staff laughed off the public disclosure yesterday of an email chain involving them, a powerful Republican lawmaker and a desire to destroy unions, the rest of us might not have gotten the joke. I can help with that. Here’s why the Midland-based, hard-right Mackinac Center might think more…
In 1984, there were an estimated 50 out LGBT officials in the whole world. Today, there are more than 1,000, and they’re on the front lines in the fight for equality every day in their respective public offices. In 2011, an additional 53 openly LGBT candidates joined their ranks, moving the dial that much closer…
By now it’s obvious that our lawmakers are primarily interested in passing laws that punish the hardest working Michiganders just to placate the top 1 percent who run corporations and special interests. From a massive tax cut for big businesses made on the backs of the working poor and seniors to the shredding of the…