Shackles and Chains: Detroit as a Template for Democracy's Destruction
Glen Ford brings the heat, and the truth, about one of the most important -- and unreported -- stories of our day: the shackling of Detroit. Over the past year, we have seen the citizens of a major American city openly, 'legally' stripped of the right to govern themselves and forced into a form of indentured servitude in order to enrich a small predatory elite whose own machinations had driven the city to ruin.
It is an extraordinary -- and sickening -- spectacle. Detroit is now under the control of an unelected "Emergency Financial Manager," Kevyn Jones, forcibly imposed by the state governor, with all real power -- the power of the purse -- placed in his hands. And Jones is wielding this power with ruthless efficiency.
As Ford notes, Detroit is being looted and disenfranchised without the slightest peep from the great compassionate progressive community organizer in the White House. And 'white' is the operative word here; Detroit's population is more than 80 percent black, but the first African-American president will not lift a finger to help the city -- although he was more than happy to lavish trillions of dollars in bailouts on Wall Street (whose population is, shall we say, somewhat less than 80 percent black).
But Ford makes the salient point that Detroit's plight goes far beyond race. The city is in fact a test case, a template, a dry run for the extinguishing of any kind of genuine democracy across the land, and its replacement by overt corporate control. You should read the whole piece, but here are a few telling excerpts:
The "restructuring" of Detroit through bankruptcy is the model for drastically downsizing what's left of democracy in all of urban America. Already, Black voting rights have been rendered null and void "on a scale not seen since the death of Reconstruction." However, the legal precedents that are being established in mostly Black Detroit will obtain throughout the nation…..
The post-Civil Rights era vision to consolidate Black Power through purely electoral means in the major cities of the United States has all but evaporated. Wherever possible, capital has reclaimed the urban centers for upscale white habitation, most often with the active collaboration of a venal Black political class concerned primarily with its own upward mobility …
Some cities, including New Orleans and Detroit, were, in the words of Public Enemy, "too Black, too strong," with African American majorities of 67 and 80-plus percent, respectively. Hurricane Katrina brought those numbers down to manageable size, creating the conditions for near-instantaneous Disaster Capitalist renaissance, in 2005. That same year, in Detroit, the so-called "Hip Hop Mayor," Kwame Kilpatrick – actually the spoiled, morally degenerate spawn of the historical Black Misleadership Class – strapped the Black metropolis into a suicide vest wired with interest rate swap derivatives. Similar devices are embedded in the fiscal structures of cities around the country, ready to bring down what's left of home rule so that capital can feast on the public space, unconstrained. …
The scheme is general, part of the worldwide offensive by Wall Street and its global annexes to absorb the public sphere wherever it exists, reducing humanity to total dependence on the dictatorship of money. In the United States, the finance bourgeoisie's bacchanal is, like all American politics, organized along racial lines – the perfect, crowd-pleasing cover for the destruction of Black voting rights on a scale not seen since the death of Reconstruction. In place of an already straitjacketed, comprador-dominated home rule, Michigan's Republican Gov. Rick Snyder governor imposed his own regent in the noxious form of Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr, who was until this year a bankruptcy attorney from the multinational firm Jones Day, which is the mercenary legal arm for much of the Fortune 500, including most of the banks that have conspired to destroy Detroit's tax base. …
Earlier in the week, Judge Rhodes rejected the NAACP's challenge to Kevyn Orr's Emergency Financial Manager powers on the grounds that they unconstitutionally disenfranchise a majority of Michigan's African American citizens. The judge said the public has a more "substantial interest in the speedy and efficient resolution of a municipal bankruptcy case that affects as many people and institutions, and as much of the local, regional and national economy, as this case does." He said the NAACP could continue its suit after the bankruptcy is done.
In other words, the people's right to vote is secondary to working out the financial claims brought by derivatives-wielding bankers. If the people's franchise stands in the way of the Lords of Capital's right to "restructure" Detroit to their liking, then the franchise must be rendered inoperative, at least until the spoils have been divvyed up – that is, until all the issues that matter have been made moot.
A great deal has been mooted in Detroit, whose fate will become the model, the legal precedent, for the rest of the country. We are witnessing the death of, not just dreams of urban Black power, but of previous notions of American democracy, itself.