LET DETROIT GO BANKRUPT?
Remember those words from Mitt Romney. I don’t have anything else to add to this.
Here’s the video of Michigan Governor’s call for PRIVITIZING DETROIT:
Your thoughts?
-
-
Black Girls Rock!
Flickr Photos
-
Potus Takes Oath of Office
Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China
My Brothers Keeper
-
-
-
-
-
AFRO PUFFS
Most Adorable Shoe Stealer
Six Little Babies
Fatherhood
-
-
Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
-
3Chics Action Alert
Lets Make It Happen
3 Chics Trio
-
REALITY Blog Award
Recent Comments
Top Posts
Guard The Change
Vote 4 Democrats
-
-
-
Go to the polls
President Barack Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama
Obama Love
Your Vote Matters
President Obama & Bo
The Obama Family
-
-
-
-
Presidential hug
-
Thanks for this news. From time to time, MSNBC reports on what is happening in Detroit and also in Wisconsin with the governors trying to break unions and privatize what are now city services. Shameful!
Detroit Sinks Deeper Into Hell As It Faces Right Wing Utopian Fantasies
By: Deborah Foster
Jul. 21st, 2013
This week, David Atkins and Lynn Parramore, writing at Alternet, each told the story of the downfall of Sears. Once an American institution with over a century of successfully providing goods and services to the nation, Sears has fallen into a state of business failure free fall. The company has been hemorrhaging customers, seeing its profits plummet, and its reputation nosedive. If there is anyone who deserves credit for the company’s demise, it is the Ayn-Rand loving, libertarian Eddie Lampert, recently ranked #2 on the Forbe’s list of America’s worst CEOs. Mr. Lampert’s decision to embrace the economic philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek, beloved among libertarian conservatives, means that he scorns investment in infrastructure, education, or the labor force. Instead, his concerns are always with austerity, budget reduction, and the bottom line. He believes in the free-market, corporate largesse, and greedy self-interest. These beliefs led him to implement an organization of his company whereby he broke it into over 30 smaller components and then basically told them that they needed to compete with each other in a cutthroat atmosphere to earn more profits. The result? Individual units within the corporation began undermining each other. Parramore notes, “Units competed for ad space in Sears’ circulars, and since the unit with the most money got the most ad space, one Mother’s Day circular ended up being released featuring a mini bike for boys on its cover.” Yes, that sounds like excellent business acumen; mini-bikes are famously popular gifts for mothers. Employees became disheartened to the point where Sears was ranked the 6th worst place to work in America by AOL Jobs.
Meanwhile, this week also brought news that the City of Detroit tried to file for bankruptcy under the direction of its state-appointed, anti-democratic “emergency manager,” only to be rebuffed by a judge’s ruling. How does Detroit’s situation relate to Sears’s sad demise? Both are facing the specter of Randian objectivism, free market fanaticism, dehumanization of ordinary people, and an abdication of corporate responsibility. As the workers at Sears have been forced into cutthroat competition, so too, have Detroit’s residents been asked to compete over insufficient and scant resources.
There is no question that Detroit has been struggling for decades. As a rust-belt city dependent on manufacturing, it has faced the same woes as many other cities in the region as our country’s manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. However, the historical dependence of Detroit on the auto industry has meant that its well-being has been tethered to the whims and welfare of the American auto corporations. As the business infrastructure of the city aged, rather than investing in and developing new factories, these corporations opened up plants in other parts of Michigan, Ohio, Canada, etc. They left behind massive, abandoned factories that not only pepper the city with dangerous, broken-down eyesores, but also left the city with a dramatic loss of jobs. With little other choice remaining, residents of the city departed by the millions seeking employment. Many of those who remained were simply too poor to relocate. The city government was left with an ever-decreasing tax base to maintain its functioning, falling more and more into debt. Instead of taxing the remaining corporations and businesses within the city, Detroit was essentially blackmailed into giving them colossal tax breaks under threat of seeing the businesses pick up and move. The State of Michigan has also been withholding funds that it is supposed to give Detroit through revenue-sharing, restricting their access even further to necessary resources.
The commonalities between what is happening to Sears and what is happening to Detroit are that both are now being subjected to right wing ideology, Ayn Rand philosophy, and von Hayek’s austerity economics. The results for each are similar. People will unnecessarily suffer. Damage will eventually need to be undone. And people will have to learn the hard way what a failure these poisonous schools of thought really are.
According to reports, the emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, and his cohorts, wealthy businessmen and corporations, have big plans for Detroit. They can’t wait to implement their conservative fantasies of privatizing and cutting city services, busting unions, selling off public assets, and laying off public employees. The citizens of Detroit have already seen 20% of their city’s workforce cut by their Democratic, multi-millionaire mayor, David Bing. In a place that suffers from a severe lack of jobs (there is one job for every four residents), more layoffs is just what the community needs. Among the upcoming plans approved by Orr are service shut-offs to neighborhoods determined to be too poor or under-populated for private investment to be profitable. The city’s unsung assets, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Belle Isle Park, and even the animals at the Detroit Zoo, have all been appraised and are ready for sale to private interests. Public services ranging from transportation to garbage collection and water treatment will soon be privatized and in the hands of for-profit corporations.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/21/detroit-sinks-deeper-hell-faces-wing-utopian-fantasies.html
THIS:
‘This week, David Atkins and Lynn Parramore, writing at Alternet, each told the story of the downfall of Sears. Once an American institution with over a century of successfully providing goods and services to the nation, Sears has fallen into a state of business failure free fall.
The company has been hemorrhaging customers, seeing its profits plummet, and its reputation nosedive. If there is anyone who deserves credit for the company’s demise, it is the Ayn-Rand loving, libertarian Eddie Lampert, recently ranked #2 on the Forbe’s list of America’s worst CEOs. Mr. Lampert’s decision to embrace the economic philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek, beloved among libertarian conservatives, means that he scorns investment in infrastructure, education, or the labor force. Instead, his concerns are always with austerity, budget reduction, and the bottom line. He believes in the free-market, corporate largesse, and greedy self-interest.”
Detroit Is Beta-Test of the GOP Plan To Sell The Federal Government to Corporations
By: RmuseJul. 20th, 2013
In the software world, the concept behind beta-testing is an external pilot-test of a product before commercial quantity production for public consumption. During the beta test stage, a product has already passed an internal pilot-test where glaring defects have been removed, but since the product may still have some minor problems that require user participation, it is released to selected customers to test under normal, everyday conditions to spot and correct remaining flaws. Republicans have long sought to privatize government, and they have given indications that their penchant for restricting revenue sources and creating phony debt crises is part of their anti-government agenda to manufacture a scenario where the government is bankrupt to give corporations the opportunity to buy-out government assets and programs for a profit. On Thursday, the first beta-test of selling off a city to corporations began in earnest when an emergency manager in Detroit filed for bankruptcy, and it is a harbinger of the Republicans’ plan for the federal government.
Republicans have long sought to sell off government assets they claim are prohibitively expensive to private, for-profit enterprises they claim are better equipped to administer them because they will base operations on sound corporate business models. What Detroit is experiencing is the Bain Capital vulture capitalist tactic of taking over a company, leveraging it with debt, declaring bankruptcy, and selling off assets and firing union employees all while turning a profit. Michigan governor Rick Snyder followed Bain’s tactics in appointing his cohort to lead the city, disband the government, and create conditions allowing the emergency manager to declare the city bankrupt to sell off assets allegedly to satisfy creditors.
It is not common for a municipality to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy according to U.S. Courts, and the purpose is to “provide a financially distressed municipality protection from its creditors while it develops and negotiates a plan for adjusting its debts. Reorganization of the debts of a municipality is typically accomplished either by extending debt maturities, or refinancing the debt by obtaining a new loan.” It may not be typical for municipalities, but it follows the Bain model right down to “refinancing the debt to obtain a new loan” that is part and parcel of leveraging a company, or in Detroit’s case, a city, with more debt it will never be able to repay without selling off all its assets.
In Detroit’s case, the city was leveraged to the hilt with state-backed bond money to allow it to meet payroll for its employees, and by feigning resistance by creditors, unions, and pension boards to take pennies on the dollar for their assets to assist in restructuring the city’s finances, the bankruptcy gives the emergency manager power to liquidate city assets, including public employee pensions, to satisfy demands for payment. Willard Romney would be proud of emergency city manager Kevyn Orr’s adherence to the Bain tactics; especially because as city employees and residents suffer like hundreds-of-thousands of employees Bain companies ruined, corporations will buy government assets for a pittance.
Everything emergency city manager Orr has done is in line with Bain tactics including misrepresenting the city’s financial situation to create the necessity for cutting expenses, services, and finally declaring bankruptcy not unlike Bain Capital did to companies they took over. An attorney for Detroit, Krystal Crittendon, criticized a recent financial report filed by Orr and said the numbers do not accurately represent the city’s fiscal woes, and it follows typical Republican rhetoric regarding the federal debt. She said, “The whole foundation that brings him here is false. We do not have a $15 billion or a $20 billion debt problem. We have less than a $2 billion short-term debt problem that we could manage if we just went out and collected revenues that are owed to the city; stop giving tax abatement to people who can actually afford to pay taxes.”
Republicans have resisted raising taxes, or even funding the IRS to collect taxes, from corporations and the wealthy while they complain social programs like Social Security and Medicare are driving the country into bankruptcy as a reason to cut spending and turn over operations like Medicare to privatization.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/20/detroit-beta-test-gop-plan-sell-federal-government-corporations.html
YEP. Rick Snyder wearing a Mitt Romney MASK, with his cooning sidekick Orr.
Detroit bankruptcy on hold, Snyder admin. smacked down by judge for “cheating good people who work”
By Eclectablog on July 19, 2013
Surprise, surprise
Yesterday afternoon, Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, with the blessing of Governor Rick Snyder, filed bankruptcy paperwork for the city at 4:06 p.m. An emergency hearing by attorneys representing city pensioners was scheduled for 4:00 p.m. in the court room of Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina. The attorneys were asked by the legal team for Governor Snyder and Kevyn Orr for a five-minute delay on the 4:00 p.m. meeting. In that time, the bankruptcy paperwork was filed, making the emergency hearing moot.
The State lawyers literally tricked the legal team representing people receiving pensions from the City of Detroit so that they could file their bankruptcy paperwork.
An attorney for the pension funds who was seeking a temporary restraining order in Ingham County to block the historic bankruptcy filing said he felt blindsided because he agreed to delay an emergency hearing by five minutes at the request of attorneys for Snyder.
During those five minutes, he said, attorneys filed the bankruptcy petition in Detroit, which generally results in a stay in all other pending lawsuits involving the city. Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina later issued a temporary restraining order preventing further actions to cut pension benefits, but said she would have issued one to stop the bankruptcy filing altogether, if given the chance.
The judge said the bankruptcy filing was made at 4:06 p.m., five minutes before her emergency hearing began.
A furious Ronald King, a lawyer representing Detroit’s General Retirement System and the Detroit Police and Fire Retirement System, said he agreed to the five-minute delay that he now believes was not requested in good faith.
The basis for the emergency hearing was a pending lawsuit claiming that the bankruptcy is illegal because public employee pensions are protected by the state constitution. And they are:
http://www.eclectablog.com/2013/07/detroit-bankruptcy-on-hold-snyder-admin-smacked-down-by-judge-for-cheating-good-people-who-work.html
Go EB. Thanks for this.Gov. Snyder & his slave-catcher thought they were gonna get away with STEALING Detroiters PENSIONS.
They always find a slave catcher to put a Black face on their evil…sadly, there’s usually one readily available.
This kind of thinking is at the heart of the Rand Paul’s It’s what the GOP governors are trying to do on the state level.