As this article was being prepared for publication, July 19, an Ingham County judge stated that the City of Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 was unconstitutional and must be withdrawn. Lawyers representing pension funds and retirees had filed for an injunction to block the bankruptcy proceedings. Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said that the bankruptcy filing violates the state constitution which protects pension benefits of public employees. Michigan Attorney Bill Schuette plans to seek an expedited hearing before the Michigan Court of Appeals.
On July 18, Kevyn Orr, the unelected “emergency city manager” of Detroit, who is in reality a Wall Street installed dictator, initiated bankruptcy proceedings for the city. Never before has a city of Detroit’s size been in this situation.
Detroit, supposedly, is billions of dollars in debt and cannot pay its bills. Seriously?
Is there really no money in Detroit to fund government services, to pay employees, to pay retired employees their well-deserved pensions?
Metropolitan Detroit is home to over a dozen Fortune 500 companies, including General Motors and Ford Motor. Revenues for GM in 2012 were $150 billion. For Ford: $136 billion. Both GM and Ford are among the top 10 richest corporations in the world.
Why don’t these major global capitalist enterprises want to “bail out” the Detroit city government? They easily could. After all, we bailed them out.
Instead, GM has welcomed the bankruptcy decision. And why not? They used their recent bankruptcy to drive down the wages of auto workers. They are more interested in stealing city workers’ pensions and reducing city wages than they are in spending money on badly needed services.
Anyone who lives in Detroit or who has driven around the city outside of the downtown area can speak to the fact that the city is in really bad shape.
The official unemployment rate is 16 percent, the highest in the nation. The percentage of children living below the poverty line in Detroit is 60 percent.
There are 78,000 abandoned buildings. Entire neighborhoods are desolate. Over 40 percent of the street lights do not work.
Organized isolation and impoverishment of the Black community
How did Detroit, a once booming city in the center of world capitalism, get this way?
If you believe the mainstream news sources, Detroit came to this point because of industrial decay, mismanagement, bloated pensions of city workers, the “stubborn” unions, the corruption of Black elected officials and a “culture” of poverty in the Black community. These are all half-truths and racist nonsense to conceal the roots of the real historical process underway.
The city’s current population, around 700,000, is roughly half of what it was in 1950. Over 80 percent of Detroit residents are Black, the highest percentage in the country for a city of over 100,000 residents. In 1950, Blacks made up around 30 percent of the population of Detroit. Often it is easy to lose sight of a process that unfolds over a number of decades. In reality, Detroit and the surrounding area have been systematically reorganized by the forces of capitalism and racism.
What has happened to Detroit in the last 60 years is similar to what has happened in nearly every major U.S. city during that time period. It is just more criminal, more obvious.
Beginning in the 1950s, the powerful automobile industry moved its plants outside the city limits, to the suburbs. Segregated Black communities were uprooted to make way for new freeways and provided with no alternative housing. Whites moved to the suburbs. In Detroit, there was a conscious practice of building walls between Black neighborhoods and new white suburban settlements.
During the 20th century, mass numbers of Black people migrated from the South in search of jobs in what is known as the Great Migration. In industrial centers like Detroit, many Black workers found jobs but encountered a highly rigid and brutally enforced apartheid-like system of employment discrimination. They worked for the lowest wages and in the most dangerous jobs. They were always the last hired and the first fired.
The city was segregated and the cops were violently racist. The entire infrastructure of the city was employed to keep Black workers in their place.
The Civil Rights Movement, which began in the South in the 1950s, by the late 1960s had become a Black Liberation Movement, especially in the urban centers.
In the late 1960s, massive rebellions occurred in nearly all of the major urban centers of the United States. One of the biggest rebellions happened in Detroit in 1967. The rebellions were in direct response to the second-class conditions of the Black community and to the murderous police forces that were used to enforce the racist system. A police raid of a party for Black soldiers returning from Vietnam was the incident that set off the week-long rebellion in Detroit.
As a result of the rebellions, reforms were won, including improvements to health care and education in Black communities. By the 1970s, however, U.S. capitalism was in full-blown reorganization. Plants were moved to the suburbs, out of industrial centers and overseas. A protracted war on the unions, which has recently become an all-out assault, began during the 1970s.
The retreat to the suburbs by the capitalists, and the accompanying withdrawal of tax revenues, has isolated and impoverished Black communities in the cities. A massive prison complex has arisen to warehouse growing numbers of poor Black and Brown youth. This is nowhere as obvious as it is in Detroit. Michigan incarceration rates are three times higher than the rest of the Midwest. Only one state outside of the South, anti-immigrant Arizona, has a higher incarceration rate than Michigan.
Detroit’s future
The people of Detroit desperately need a functioning city government. But will the process of bankruptcy provide this or will it aid the ongoing process of instituting two separate cities—one for the rich and one for everybody else?
The same judicial system that let murderer George Zimmerman go free will not help reorganize Detroit in the interests of the people of Detroit. It is not a coincidence that the first major city to file for bankruptcy has the largest Black population percentage-wise as well as some of the wealthiest corporations. We live under a racist system. During a time of capitalist austerity, Black workers are being made to pay a greater price than the rest of the population.
Michigan has billions for prisons, but when it comes to badly needed services for the people of Detroit? They starve you out and then send your city to court!
The system has abandoned the people of Detroit and left them and their city to rot. To protect workers’ jobs and pensions and save the people of Detroit the debt should be canceled and the auto companies seized. We should all join the fight against the bankruptcy.
