Occupy the Wall
Street
dictator before he occupies you
Published
• Sun, Dec 11, 2011
By Charlie Brown
Emergency managers have already replaced the people�s elected
officials in majority Black cities around the state and in the Detroit
Public Schools and made draconian austerity cuts to public workers and
public health, welfare and safety services.
This puts Detroit between a
rock and a hard place, forcing the mayor and city council to consider
harmful cuts, but less than what a financial
dictator would make.
Mayor Dave Bing is pushing for privatization of services and asking
the city�s public unions to take a 10 percent cut in wages that
non-union employees took a couple of years ago. The mayor is also
seeking medical benefit and pension cuts.
Some on the council, worried the mounting debt will enable Michigan
Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to appoint an emergency manager, talk of
even greater sacrifices: laying off 2,300 public workers, closing
recreational centers and eliminating subsidies to city museums, the
health department and the Detroit Zoo. Last week, the mayor
volunteered himself to be the emergency manager, but that proposal was
opposed by all.
Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-dominated legislature, to give
more powers to the financial
dictator than the old law provided,
changed the law regarding the appointment of emergency managers. An EM
will now usurp the powers of democratically elected officials in order
to give priority to financial and
Wall Streetinterests over the
interests of city workers and citizens� city services.
If an emergency manager is appointed for Detroit, it will result in
mass firings and harsh wage and benefit reductions for Detroit city
workers. City worker jobs, government jobs, public jobs are real jobs.
Losing jobs will add to the city�s deficit because of lost taxes from
income and property. It will, of course, put more Detroiters into dire
economic straights.
The appointment of an emergency manager to solve the city�s economic
crisis would be profoundly un-American and undemocratic. It would be a
violation of Detroit residents� right to self-determination.
Who is to blame for this crisis?
Detroit�s financial crisis is rooted in the problems of the city�s
automobile-dependent economy. While the auto industry is making a
small comeback, it will never be what it was. Hundreds of thousands of
good paying auto jobs and the tax base they provided were lost, never
to be seen again.
We live in a private enterprise system. This means private business
leaders, not public officials, make the decisions that determine the
ups and downs of our economy. The tea party and Republican story
(pushed 30 years ago by former President Reagan) that �government is
big and bad, and free enterprise is lean and mean,� has been exposed
in the last several years as a big lie put forward by the system,
threatening bankruptcies of the private sector�s largest corporations
and financial institutions.
Where should the money come from to fix Detroit�s deficit? The federal
government � and I say that without any hesitation. If
Wall
Street
could be bailed out to the tune of $11 trillion (as once reported by
the Financial Times; the amount is probably more than that by now),
Detroit can be bailed out for $300 million or $400 million or more.
Wall
Street banks were more broke than Detroit and they were bailed
out by the mythically inefficient public sector, �Big Gov�ment.� Some
of that federal money (that they gave the
Wall
Street banks) is our
tax money, money from the people of Detroit.
Importantly, it is not Detroit officials� corruption or incompetence
that has led to the fiscal crisis, but the economic and financial
incompetence and greed of banks and corporations. Whatever faults they
have, these local public officials, largely African American men and
women, are no worse than the dozens of white men whoexclusively ran
Detroit city government for so many decades.
Detroit�s deficit is also due to the decisions by the private sector
to move so much of the former robust Detroit business sector out of
the city over the last 50 years. This is another way that the private
sector is responsible for Detroit�s plight. As I said, this is a
private enterprise system and Detroit public officials have
essentially no power over this major trend. They have no authority to
start city-owned enterprises that might substitute for the runaway
plants, shops and businesses.
This city�s financial problems are not fundamentally due to city
officials� bad decisions, but to the disinvestment from and failures
of corporate America in Detroit. The last thing the city needs is a
�CEO-thinking� emergency manager. It was CEO thinking that bankrupted
Wall
Street, General Motors and Chrysler.
Given the revenue streams that go straight to
Wall
Street from
Detroit, it is not far off to characterize any emergency manager as a
Wall
Street financial
dictator.
I say, �Occupy�
Wall
Street financial
dictators
Listen to:
WCHB-AM: NewsTalk 1200
http://blackplanet.songza.com/listen/wchb-am-newstalk-1200-radioone/?omcamp=LSAP_Detroit_wchbnewsdetroit.com
Snyder's
proposal first talked about saving our art and pensions... how did all
but 2 Detroit house Democrats end up voting for a scheme to give our
entire city to Snyder for years? is this the Twilight's Zone? thank
you David E. Nathan and Rose Mary Robinson
for defending Democracy in Detroit. KILL THE BILL IN THE SENATE..
CALL SENATORS SMITH HOOD, JOHNSON, HUNTER, AND YOUNG TODAY VOTE NO TO
LONG-TERM STATE OVER-SIGHT!
