Adopted May 9, 2009
The Socialist Party of Michigan expresses its strongest condemnation of the $304 million cuts to the state budget imposed through an executive order by Democratic Governor Granholm, and immediately passed by the State House and Senate Appropriations Committees on Thursday May 7th. In a period of depression-level unemployment figures, rampant school closures, and financial starvation of critically essential state and municipal services, state lawmakers from both corporate parties have once again acted to balance the budget on the backs of Michigan’s working class and poor without regard for the degree of social devastation underlying or imposed by their actions…
Under the state Democratic Party-initiated cuts, the Department of Human Services will be slashed by over $92 million, including cuts of nearly $12 million dollars from welfare programs and nearly $40 million from childcare services. Despite massive layoffs presently resulting in another 1,500 Michigan residents becoming uninsured every week, the budget of the Michigan Department of Community Health will be cut by over $53 million, including cuts of $16 million from the state Medicaid fund, with a resulting loss of 36.8 million federal matching dollars to follow. With school districts around the state already facing the inability to maintain minimally essential operations, education and school aid funding will be cut by nearly $7.5 million.
Within two days following the budget order, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced the impending closure of twelve state campgrounds as a result of a nearly half-million dollar loss to its operations, alongside a cut of over $5 million to the Department of Environmental Quality. Michigan’s strapped municipalities will be hard pressed to fill the gaps for any such losses. While already confronting widespread economic emergencies of their own, Granholm’s order will deal city budgets a second blow with $40 million in cuts to local shared revenues.
With “law and order” an even higher priority for the ruling elite in the present economic climate, the state corporate media has overwhelmingly centered the focus of its coverage of the Governor’s order on the inclusion of cuts to the State Department of Police. None of such press stories, however, have apparently found it worthy to mention that the comparatively minuscule cut of $9 million to State Police Department constitutes only two percent of its bloated $566 million budget. The order’s $10 million cut to the Department of Corrections is similarly trifling when compared to the $2 billion (one fifth of the total budget!) the state spends on Corrections at present. Careful to avoid any perceptible reduction in funding for the state’s prison-industrial complex, over 90% of the order’s cut to the Corrections budget will be made through employee “furlough days” to reduce the labor cost of the 1/3rd all state workers whom the Corrections Department employs.
Predictably, Granholm’s budget overhaul order also spares the Michigan Strategic Fund (MSF) from facing even a $10 million reduction to its budget. The MSF is the hat the state of Michigan wears for purposes of legally financing the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) – the primary body overseeing the various state government programs established to dole out multi-million dollar corporate welfare grants to corporations that conduct some portion of their operations in Michigan. Describing itself as, “a corporation, not a bureaucracy…matching up resources and services with the needs of our business customers,” the MEDC is run by an Executive Committee chaired by Rock Enterprises CEO Matthew Cullen and comprised of a gang of corporate executives with full authority to distribute state tax dollars among the state’s corporate elite.
The Socialist Party of Michigan seeks to provide a genuine working people’s alternative to the relentless betrayals and ever more intolerable assaults from the twin corporate parties. The SPMI Platform outlines an extensive program providing a path and vision for a truly democratic workers’ state government run by and for the state’s majority, rather than its richest one-percent. Along the way of this path, the Socialist Party of Michigan calls for an immediate end to all forms of corporate welfare, a steeply graduated state income and estate tax, the abolition of regressive sales, sin and property taxes, and a 100% capital flight tax on corporations that attempt to cut labor costs by leaving the state.
Furthermore, we call for full employment, a $15/hr minimum wage (i.e., a minimum yearly salary of $31,200), free socialized health care and lifelong education, a massive state public works program to re-build our cities and communities, and full funding for state and municipal services to meet the needs of Michigan workers and the state’s environment.
Especially in light of the massive and growing unemployment, the Socialist Party of Michigan calls for the placement of all major corporations under democratic and collective ownership and workers’ self-management. Only once we eliminate the obsolete and unaffordable cost of corporate private profits can our state’s budget ever truly become balanced.