Detroit police Chief Ralph Godbee is using this YouTube post to prepare officers for reduced standards of living and working under the city’s controversial consent agreement with the state of Michigan. He urges all police department employees to accept cuts in wages and benefits so that he won’t have to lay off any more officers. [...]

Singer, songwriter, comedian Lisa Koch wrote the lyrics and performed this on-point parody, slightly modified in response to the silencing of Michigan Rep. Lisa Brown for using the word “vagina” in a debate over legislation on the subject. Hands Off My Clam Copyright 2012 Tongueinchc Productions I’d like to do a song right now on the recent [...]

Protest: a disorganized and chaotic reaction by activists and other people to political or economic actions extremely likely to affect their lives negatively. To the uninitiated, this definition might make sense. But now that I’ve participated, I realize that a successful demonstration is neither disorganized nor chaotic. Here’s one case: On January 16, 2012, a [...]

Michigan’s controversial emergency manager law was signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on March 16, 2011, effective the same day. It enables a governor to appoint an emergency manager to take control of local governments and school districts found insolvent by a review board. The review board is appointed by the governor, and, yes, so [...]

Update 6/14/2012: The state House passed a version of this bill 70 to 39 on June 13.  The State of Michigan is considering one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation: House Bill No. 5711. It could effectively ban the procedure in Michigan. The bill was introduced by Rep. Bruce Rendon on May 31, 2012. The [...]

I moved to Michigan two years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’d worked in local government for nine years. My experience as a county department head gave me insight into how political decisions are made and modified. I can best sum up my opinions by sharing this quote: “Democracy is the worst [...]

The Occupy Caravan is traveling across the country, west coast to east, converging in Philadelphia on Independence Mall for a five-day, Occupy National Gathering that ends on the Fourth of July. The two major arms of the caravan will stop at 13 hub cities, each a starting point for groups from other cities nearby. Groups from Detroit [...]

In the continuing struggle over a consent agreement that takes control of City of Detroit finances and operations and puts them into state hands, Mayor Dave Bing again urged the Detroit City Council to stop fighting it. Bing spoke to the council a day before a scheduled hearing on a case challenging the validity of the [...]

The sudden, self-inflicted collapse of US Rep. Thaddeus McCotter’s reelection campaign, while unprecedented, was not unforeseen. The yawning chasm between McCotter and his constituents is legendary. I should know. I’ve spent the last 5 years documenting his legacy. (If you’d like to see for yourself, I’ve created playlists on Youtube/erox07 called McCotter & Me and McCotter & Me: [...]

A young filmmaker who stumbled into a job at the New York Times spent the last three years making a documentary about what he saw there: a corporate newspaper industry trying to rescue sinking profits by cutting labor-intensive journalism, particularly  investigative reporting. Now he needs less than $8,000 for stock-footage licensing fee and costs for [...]