All right, Governor Rick Snyder, stop fool­ing around. This is a prank, right? This is some hoax you and Ashton Kutcher came up with for the biggest “Punk’d” moment of all time, right?

Nope. We’re doomed. Snyder is shaft­ing Michiganders. His plan? Privatizing pris­ons, screw­ing democ­racy, dumb­ing down the peo­ple of Michigan, reap­ing ben­e­fits from the poor, and invest­ing that money into corporations.

Snyder’s plan is to elim­i­nate deduc­tions for pen­sions and place a tax on them. In the name of “shared sac­ri­fice,” he also plans to increase tax rates for the entire pub­lic so he can then spend bil­lions of dol­lars on pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions in Michigan.

During his cam­paign, Snyder’s ten-point plan to rein­vent Michigan said he “believes that we need to reduce the tax bur­den on fam­i­lies and busi­nesses in Michigan.” Instead, Snyder is doing a fan­tas­tic job of depriv­ing the poor­est cit­i­zens and the work­ing class res­i­dents of Michigan by increas­ing their per­sonal tax burden.

Thanks to Snyders’ timely sign­ing of a bill for the unem­ploy­ment pro­gram, unem­ployed res­i­dents will be given an exten­sion for fed­eral unem­ploy­ment. In that bill were changes that will now include a reduc­tion from 26 weeks to 20 weeks of state-paid unem­ploy­ment benefits.

Another change in this bill was a cut to the unem­ploy­ment insur­ance pro­gram ben­e­fit­ing cor­po­ra­tions that were required to pay for insur­ance for their unem­ployed work­ers. Michigan is now the only state that offers less than 26 weeks of state-paid unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits and is also one of the hard­est states hit by unemployment.

Both of these changes were not men­tioned as Gov. Snyder announced that he signed the bill. In fact, he made it appear that this was a pos­i­tive thing for unem­ployed res­i­dents of Michigan.

“In sign­ing this bill, the gov­er­nor has tried to dis­tract Michiganders from the full story, seek­ing to por­tray leg­is­la­tion that includes a dras­tic and per­ma­nent cut as a ‘pro­tec­tion’ for the unem­ployed,” said Senator Carl Levin.

Currently the gov­er­nor is run­ning our gov­ern­ment focused solely on ben­e­fit­ing cor­po­ra­tions. Instead of car­ing about the peo­ple of Michigan, our gov­er­nor wants to give cor­po­ra­tions $1.8 bil­lion in tax cuts.

The gov­er­nor gave no warn­ing for any of the changes he has made to our gov­ern­ment dur­ing his cam­paign. Many peo­ple have been betrayed.

Snyder didn’t come out and say, “Hey every­body, vote for me, I’m going to make your local gov­ern­ment offi­cials use­less and tax the hell out of you.”

The peo­ple were not given any warn­ing. We weren’t asked to vote on any­thing. Most peo­ple didn’t know about it until after the bill was actu­ally signed.

Unfortunately, mat­ter what the party line is, politi­cians only look out for their cor­po­rate benefactors.

The only thing the peo­ple can do is speak up by send­ing let­ters to gov­ern­ment offi­cials’ offices or by sign­ing peti­tions. We’re not help­less; there are ways to cre­ate change as long as that right is not stripped away from us too. n

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