80% Black Detroit Under Attack: Mr. Obama, Whose Side Are You On?
By John Spritzler
21 July, 2013
Newdemocracyworld.org
"'Detroit is basically broke': cuts, cuts and cuts to follow bankruptcy filing" is the title of today's Guardian article. Also in the article is: "Detroit has 9,700 city employees who all now face pay cuts and worse, and close to 20,000 retirees whose pensions and health care benefits are under attack. 'Detroit should not be rebuilt on the backs of the men and women who played by the rules and worked hard to provide city services,' said said Al Garrett, president of Michigan branch of the AFSCME union."
The conflict over what will be the future of the mostly black, and almost entirely working class, people who live in Detroit is not hard to understand. It is a conflict between the few haves versus the many have-nots.
Who are these few haves?
They are the plutocracy that controls the United States. They are the people who measure their personal wealth in billions, not millions, of dollars. They are the people to whom, directly or indirectly, the debts of the City of Detroit are owed.
They are the people who own the banks and who bought the bonds talked about in the article cited above--in other words they are the people who loaned money to the City of Detroit in the expectation that the City would pay them back with interest by taking the money from Detroit's taxpayers. They are the very rich from whom the City of Detroit should have taken--as a tax, not a loan!--the money that the people of Detroit needed to enjoy a decent standard of living, never mind the obscenely luxurious standard of living that the plutocracy takes for granted.
They are the corporate elite and politicians beholden to them who, for decades starting in the 1970s, shipped union jobs with decent wages (Detroit in 1960 had the highest per capita income in the nation) overseas in order to further enrich themselves at the expense of the people of Detroit, by pitting them against people in China who were even worse off and forced to work for super cheap wages in order to survive.
They are the people who control the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department who formed a cozy alliance with the Communist rulers of China to screw the Chinese peasants driven into sweat shops, and get funding from the Chinese government's purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds to fund Trillion dollar wars of Orwellian social control against Muslims around the world, all based on lies like the one they got caught in (Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq) and the one the American people are beginning to realize, on a large scale, was the Biggest Lie of all--the official story of the 9/11 attack.
They are the people who pocket, as weapons industry profits, much of the Trillions of dollars the government spends fighting a bogeyman enemy. They are the people who pocket the Trillions of dollars the government gives to "too big to fail" banks. They are the people who pocket the bulk of the Fortune 500 profits of routine capitalism, profits that are a form a legalized theft from working people like the people of Detroit, who by their labor produce all the wealth on the planet (other than raw materials) but who are paid wages that are only a fraction of the wealth they produce.
And who are the have-nots?
They are people who want to work or study in preparation for working. They are people who line up by the hundreds for a single job opening. They are people who want to contribute to society, as some do presently but others don't because the haves figure they can make more profits by not hiring them than by hiring them.
They are people who want a far more equal and democratic world, in which there are no rich and poor but instead everybody who contributes to society reasonably shares in the fruits of the economy equally, according to need.
They are people who think the privileges and power and domination over others that today's haves enjoy should not be permitted to anybody.
They are the people who think that everybody in Detroit who is willing to contribute to society in a way that the ordinary people of the United States agreed is, under the circumstances, reasonable, should have--as a human right!--the things that they need to provide them with the same decent standard of living as anybody else, and that nobody--especially people who think honest work is beneath them, like the haves, deserves to live in luxury while people willing to work live in poverty.
They are the people who think that retirees should enjoy--as a human right!--a decent standard of living, and that any excuse for denying them this right, like the gobledegook about pension funds and debts that the haves love to trot out to "explain" why pensions have to be cut, is BS.
So, Mr. Obama, whose side are you on?
It's time to start Thinking about Revolution.
John Spritzler is editor of www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
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