Detroit Citizens Prepare to Fight Their Corporate Master

Kevyn Orr, center, a lawyer who has focused on restructuring businesses, 
and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, right, during a news conference in
 Detroit, March 14, 2013. (Photo: Fabrizio Costantini / The New York Times)

 By Mark Vorpahl, Occupy.com 

Fresh from shoving his "Right to Work for Less" legislation down the throats of Michigan's workers, Governor Rick Snyder has grown bolder in pursuing a corporate agenda. He has now appointed Kevyn Orr of Jones Day Law firm to act as an Emergency Financial Manager (EFM) of Detroit.

As an EFM, Orr can dismiss elected officials, tear up union contracts, privatize public assets and impose new taxes without a vote. The trappings of democracy are swept away like so many cobwebs. Nearly half of all of Michigan's African-American citizens are now effectively left with no vote in local government; they are stuck with taxation without representation.

With the appointment of an EFM, Governor Snyder is transforming Detroit into an occupied colony within the State. Instead of guns, the armies sent into Detroit will carry briefcases filled with lucrative contracts to ensure complete corporate domination at the expense of the city's residents.

Their task will be to find ways to squeeze more labor out of Detroit's workers while paying them less, open up publicly owned services for private investment, and cut social programs that do not contribute to the enrichment of the 1% by enforcing an austerity program. And the results are predictable: austerity will cause even more unemployment and increase the deficit further just as it has done in Europe.

This development is a bi-partisan affair. While Governor Snyder is a Republican, Kevyn Orr is a Democrat who worked for President Obama's election. Detroit's Democratic Mayor, Dave Bing, said of his relationship with Snyder that they are "joined at the hip." .....

The banks and corporations are the ones responsible for Detroit's financial crisis. Yet they are the ones who will reap the rewards of an Emergency Financial Manager. It will be their interests that Kevyn Orr is there to serve, by making sure they get paid first and foremost, above all other considerations.

In a city with an official 10.2 percent unemployment rate, where 57 percent of children live below the poverty line, where street lights are left off, roads left unrepaired, and bus service is spotty, it would be hard to imagine a scheme worse than appointing an EFM. The priorities of this "solution" are in opposition to the values of a community most workers hold dear.

For the full article, please go here: http://truth-out.org/news/item/15217-detroit-citizens-prepare-to-fight-their-corporate-master

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I may have left Michigan in 1975, but that does not lessen my caring for Detroit and all those everywhere who are impacted by the sometimes subtle, but always insidious tentacles of that which oppresses, harms, crushes, destroys - all in the name of "for our own good." Greed, propaganda, distortions, distractions, and lies wear many faces. May we each learn to increasingly discern and recognize these faces. May we become stronger and more fierce in the ways in which we do our part in working together to create a world which cares for all beings. Blessed be. ♥ Molly