This week, the Michigan legislature passed - and the governor signed into law - a bill that would permit Governor Rick Snyder to push aside elected city officials and replace them with emergency financial managers in any municipality or school district facing financial difficulties. The law would include virtually every town and city in the state as those cities that aren't bankrupt already soon will be once the governor's proposed budget - which cuts billions in aid to municipalities and school districts - is approved by the legislature. One of the most shocking, Draconian, democracy-destroying measures in the history of this country has became law - and the nation has seemingly slept through it. The new law, described by one of the GOP legislators sponsoring the bill as financial martial law", empowers the governor's appointees [referred to as 'Emergency Financial Managers'] to fire duly elected local officials, cancel labor contracts and even dissolve entire communities and school districts. This is about so much more than collective bargaining agreements and unions. This law gives an appointee of the governor - which, by the way, may be a corporation - the authority to dismiss any or all of a municipality's elected government officials.