Detroit: Turnaround vs. Transformation
By Tom Stephens
31 October, 2012
Countercurrents.org
It’s Like a Heat Wave
The neoliberal corporate austerity regimes that are aggressively taking over the world, from Greece and Italy to Wisconsin and California, have not left Detroit unmolested. Although it’s far too often viewed in corporate media thru the frame of “ruins porn,” as a hopeless post-industrial wasteland and human slag heap, in fact well over half a million souls still call the former Motor City home. You’d never know it from the vapid local media or political leadership, but there are exciting, transformative things happening in the streets and at the grassroots.
For the local neoliberal Masters of Detroit, the narrative and the unthinking propaganda are all about “turnaround.” There’s a Fiscal Stability Agreement and a Fiscal Advisory Board; a Program Management Director and new, much better paid Chief Financial Officer. Governor Snyder and Mayor Bing periodically shuffle out in front of cameras to falsely claim that they are working to “fix” the city and its pathological (i.e., Black) “culture.” Nonprofit philanthropists and their local economic development minions natter about “alignment,” “synergy” and “low-hanging fruit.” As if abusing empty jargon ever served anything but injustice and oppression.
State Treasurer Andy Dillon was a corporate “turnaround” expert before he was a politician. Program Management Director Kriss Andrews was a “turnaround” expert too before he took charge of Detroit’s new “slow emergency manager” government structure. They represent the interests of the 1% as an “investor” class. The Fiscal Advisory Board and Dillon are now making new demands – as a condition of receiving desperately needed funds from this year’s bond issue. The city must hire another “turnaround” expert firm (Wasn’t that what they were supposed to do?), as well as another “operational restructuring” firm. Wall Street will be served. And they’ll scoff again at the people’s objections to it as a “takeover.”
When will the stacking of one such “turnaround” consultant on another end? Employing the rhetoric and ideology of “turnaround,” the infamous race to the bottom of social, environmental and economic standards has become a circling of the drain – for Detroit’s self-appointed saviors and their disaster capitalist platitudes, if not for its people who know about struggle and transformation from the school of real life. The city’s leadership team is continually asking the wrong questions – at least if improving the quality of life for the vast majority of the city’s people is any part of their objectives – and therefore they will continue to come up with the wrong “fixes” until they change their approach from “turnaround” to transformation.
Inner City Blues
When the new and improved political elites of southeastern Michigan talk Detroit “turnaround” these days, the essential meaning is not lost on us. They propose to balance the city’s budget challenges (which are no different in kind, if of greater magnitude than those of other communities in the wake of Wall Street’s implosion of the global economy), without providing any benefit to the people who live in the city. Such fiscal stability thru austerity is the very essence of the “turnaround” they are executing.
This new routine goes by several names: socializing the risks and privatizing the benefits; systems failure; capitalist boom-and-bust; Wall Street vs. Main Street (forget about Woodward Avenue – and the residential streets of Detroit’s neighborhoods might as well not even exist, for all their significance in the “turnaround”); Third World-style structural adjustment. It’s the same process of enriching elites by dispossessing Detroiters.
It all comes down to one huge, glaring, destructive policy failure: the frame of “turnaround” is a frame that fits the bankrupt enterprises Bing (Bing Steel) and Andrews (Energy Conversion Devices) left in their wake before coming to molest Detroit. It does not really fit their new victim community. They are off on the wrong road. Detroit is a city, not a corporate entity. How long will the rest of us let them drag us off into the bushes to work their funky scam?
Dancing in the Street
People in Detroit who actually live here, unlike the “turnaround” gang who play Detroiters on TV, know some things about human and community transformation that won’t be easily ignored. Detroit’s condition today is a function of austerity policies implemented on high at the behest of Wall Street and its corrupt agents; the historic path that got us here is the result of pathological disinvestment, racism, regional dysfunction, stunted dollar democracy and privatization/corporatization of the people’s common life. “Turnaround” and realignment won’t happen without facing these realities, no matter how many corporate and philanthropic dollars are thrown at them.
As Detroit’s universally acclaimed demographics guru Kurt Metzger recently told Free Press columnist Rochelle Reilly, being “data-driven” alone won’t cut it. What’s absolutely needed is a collaborative, holistic, reality-based solutionary approach: “attacking multiple issues at the same time -- education, recreation, crime, housing, services, transportation and all the other issues that are inter-related.” (http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012310140196)
The real key to facing Detroit’s situation is in the difference between this “turnaround” agenda and the transformational political, environmental, economic and energy-related challenges of Detroit the community. Issues like alternative economic systems; the planet’s ecological survival as well as the city’s; the city’s thriving urban agriculture community; and uncountable other commons-nourishing community features of Detroit that don’t fit in the “turnaround” frame.
Detroiters dealing with Detroit’s daily reality by force of our straitened circumstances have to – and in many cases are – asking what we must do to create and take responsibility for our deepest values and most important decisions in this challenging time, with the idea we recall from the 2010 US Social Forum: “Another World is Possible, Another Detroit is Happening!”
Meeting the real challenges like climate, energy, education, housing, transit, security, and protecting human rights will be tuff in Detroit. I expect they’ll be tuff everywhere in this next time period. In some important ways Detroiters have a comparative advantage in learning how to deal with the new normal – all that deindustrialization history, the labor/civil rights traditions persisting in new forms like Occupy, again uncountable truly transformational creative, spiritual, and social initiatives. It lends a positive sense of urgency to Detroit’s grassroots appeal.
Detroiters are some of the world’s leading experts in doing what needs to be done in this hardscrabble situation – the only experts about it in Detroit. Yet Detroit’s city is now being governed in a takeover and turnaround mode without acknowledging, much less serving the dignity of the ordinary Detroiters who have to live with the real world consequences of the turnaround decisions. How can we not be looking around pro-actively for options to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash and an uncertain future? That’s exactly what we’re doing.
What’s Goin’ On?
Professor Peter Hammer directs the Damon Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. But the city’s top-ranking “turnaround” team has not to my knowledge used or even considered his perspective about our situation and its potential resolution. For example, in his recent introduction to the Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 13, No. 1:
“When governance fails, people suffer. Individuals and minority groups can be denied their right to effective representation, state and national decision making processes (governance) can be corrupted by concentrated private interests, impoverished communities can be denied basic services, patterns of racial segregation can be perpetuated and entire public school systems can be threatened with collapse.
Good governance has 8 major characteristics. It is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law. It assures that corruption is minimized, the views of minorities are taken into account and that the voices of the most vulnerable in society are heard in decision-making. It is easier to critically examine the shortcomings of other countries than it is to introspectively examine our own institutions; but we must critically examine our institutions. Governance has an infrastructure, some aspects of which are deeply embedded in culture, time and law.
Other aspects of governance are more readily subject to change and manipulation. The lines determining congressional districts, for example, seem to be written in sand and are easily changed and frequently manipulated. Relatedly, what we condemn in Third World countries as bribery and corruption, we regulate in this country under the guise of laws governing campaign finance. The lines separating competition in public and private markets is porous with power and influence flowing in both directions. Predictably, however, the same groups seem to be disempowered in both the public and the private realms, typically the poor and other under-represented minorities. Good governance is critical to good policy and good results.
While Michigan might be pushing the envelope on questions of emergency managers and
competition for public schools, it is substantially behind the curve on questions of effective regional governance. Southeast Michigan remains one of the most economically and racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. This is the real underlying cause of much of the financial distress facing Detroit and the region. There can be no economic integration without racial integration.
In the 1920s through the 1950s, Detroit maintained numerous invisible lines defining racially segregated neighborhoods; lines that were violently defended. When these boundaries no longer held, white Detroiters moved out of the city. The new lines separating city from suburbs were easier to defend and proved much harder to transgress.
An understanding of physics is essential to the practice of engineering. An understanding of biology is essential to the practice of medicine. An understanding of governance is essential to the practice of good policy making. We need to improve the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented in Michigan and
throughout the country. Ultimately, theories of public governance must be centered around people and facilitate active public engagement.”
There’s a word for local leaders who willfully ignore such insights: Failures.
The real Detroit – Detroit the beloved community instead of Detroit the “turnaround” entity – is too big to fail like that. Bring on the transformation. Put the kibosh on corporate “turnaround” with no equity for the city’s 700,000 people.
Tom Stephens is a people's lawyer in Detroit. He has advocated environmental justice for over 20 years, and is currently coordinating community safety for the 2010 US Social Forum. Email: [email protected]
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