Even with all my Michigan friends on Facebook, it was probably only my daily newspaper routine that brought to my attention the foolish decree by emergency mismanagement making Detroit the largest city in U.S. history ever to file for bankruptcy. I had to scrounge around to find any inkling of a response to this latest predatory move on behalf of Ricky Snyder and his shadowy cohort, and when I found one, I learned why it was so hard to find. Apparently people generally buy the line fed them by the governor’s lackey, Kevyn Orr: Detroit supposedly has no other options. This “no other options” malarky should be painfully familiar by now to people in my generation. Every time we see the money for programs we value being funneled into programs that have nothing to do with us, we’re told that there are no other options. The financial crisis could have been an occasion for a public debate about what we consider important, but instead it’s been used as a cudgel by bullies who lock us all into step with their agendas under the name of economic necessity. To make matters worse, we find ourselves surrounded by people describing themselves as “liberals” and “progressives” who see in this bullying nothing but good common sense.
Orr’s ridiculous story has it that out of its $18 billion in debt, the city cannot possibly afford the $2 billion that will need to be paid over the long term to people who work or have worked for the city, money that in large part has already been taken out of paychecks and put into so-called “retirement accounts.” To add insult to injury, we’ll be expected to accept this nonsense in the coming years as we watch billions of public dollars dumped into a new entertainment center for Michigan’s comfortable suburbanites, an entertainment center that will be built largely with taxpayer dollars using various forms of public funds and subsidies before being branded with names like “5/3 Bank Stadium, home of the Detroit Red Wings Presented by Amway.” Posters like the ones I saw in Los Angeles last week will go up telling us how many jobs these projects have created and how much money is now circulating through Detroit, but none of them will point out that these jobs are primarily menial service jobs, and none of them will explain where this money goes when it gets done circulating (it goes to the benevolent Mike Ilitch).
This story is lent some rhetorical weight with the claim that Detroit needs to file for bankruptcy if it is going to be able to provide public services here and now. But what kinds of public services are we talking about? These are going to be “public services” as brought to you by the people who considered selling off the privately donated holdings of the world-renowned Detroit Institute of Art. We can expect to see a chunk of public money dumped into beefing up the police force, and that will be money well spent in Snyder’s eyes as the situation for real people living in Detroit becomes bleaker and bleaker, inevitably provoking public protests. But forget about using any of that money for programs known to reduce crime. Public transit serving Detroit residents will be left to disintegrate because that money will be needed for shiny extensions of the light rail connecting parking garages to shopping centers. We can forget about expanded hours at Detroit’s beautiful public library (assuming that is not sold off to pay the banks), there will certainly not be any new public spaces for the creative young people currently investing their time and energy in Detroit, and you are a looney tune if the thought of a desperately needed bus system integrating Detroit with the rest of the state even entered your mind (what’s that? a train? socialism!). We can expect “public services” that recreate private living rooms in a massive mall for those who have the cash to spend. But don’t expect any public services that might create publicly accessible public spaces.
Meanwhile, self-proclaimed “liberals” in the blogosphere have sheepishly backed up Snyder & Trolls in the name of sound management (whatever its source of political legitimacy or lack thereof). The story here is that these are desperate times, and desperate times call for the gruesome, meta-legal sacrifice of laboring people to the Titans of Industry--errrr, of Little Caesar’s. These kinds of “liberals” should be familiar to students of global history. In the Americas during the late 1960s and early 1970s, radicals and liberals of different stripes like Daniel Bell, Dilma Rousseff, or Irving Kristol all turned from somewhere left of center to embrace basic right-wing tenants, even if, like Rousseff, they somehow managed to retain some of their "radical" credentials. These people proudly advocated public projects during postwar boom times, but turned to some measure of laissez-faire economics and crippling austerity the minute economic crises began to settle in during the late 1960s.
This kind of development is often thought of as a swing from left to right. But more often than not there is an underlying consistency at work: no matter how progressive these kinds of thinkers hope to be, at some level they have learned to trust in capitalists as trustworthy pilots. Sure, when times are good, they’re righteous people who want public health care and public schools and all the rest. But when trouble comes, they’re grateful, quietly or otherwise, for the brutality of a Ricky S. willing to pave over anyone for the sake of job-creating billionaires. What’s good for Mike Ilitch must surely be good for the rest of us--or else! Shutter the libraries, close the universities, sell off the art museums, and don’t even think of subsidizing a medical research center or a movie studio. By god, just think of what it will be like to have a movie theater right across the parking lot from a Trader Joe’s! For after all, many of my understanding liberal friends tell me, those kinds of dead end jobs are the only ones the average citizen of Detroit can handle (if you’re liberal, you get to keep your racism very thinly veiled).
Supporters of Orr’s decision to have Detroit file for bankruptcy, no matter how they describe themselves politically, agree about one thing: the only way to turn Detroit around is to file for bankruptcy. What they really mean is that the only way to appease the billionaires is by using a federal court to gut laboring people legally holding pensions protected by state law. Orr, a specialist in bankruptcy, was unilaterally appointed by Snyder to file for bankruptcy. If that bankruptcy goes through, it will be used to pave a space for investors with no more than a financial interest in promoting anything resembling the public good. And even if you argue that these investors are likable people with long histories in Detroit, the fact remains that Ilitch doesn’t need public subsidies, and he certainly doesn’t need money that belongs to others.
As many, from capitalists, to creative types, to gangsters, have already realized, Detroit is currently a major investment opportunity. You can call yourself liberal or conservative all week, but when it comes to Detroit, there’s a very simple choice at hand. You can side with Little Ricky, file for bankruptcy, wrest the city and all of its resources from the people of Michigan, and hand it over to “developers” who will build whatever will make them a buck, no matter how short-sighted or idiotic it might be. Or, if you live in Michigan (because this is a state-wide issue), you can pay attention and begin to use the public forums that remain to make some public decisions about Detroit’s future. That future should certainly include a commitment to paying workers what they are owed. It should also include an investigation into the mismanagement that dug Detroit an $18 billion hole, followed by a series of civil suits. In the meantime, we need to be aware that Slick Rick engineered this bankruptcy to take the money owed to workers, money legally protected under state law, and to redirect it into massive public subsidies for a privately owned shopping and entertainment district. This is not a story of crippling debt and economic necessity. This is a political story. If you want to understand what His Ricketyness, the Eternally Snyde, is up to--or, more generally, if you want to understand why shit keeps happening to you--then you must think politically.
