Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, covering the Statewide Organizers' Conference sponsored by the Moratorium Now! Coalition in downtown Detroit on December 6, 2008. (Photo: Alan Pollock)., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Emergency manager seeks to restructure debt to further impoverish the people
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
After nearly a month of emergency management in the city of Detroit the conditions of the working class has worsened. Attacks are intensifying on municipal employees and the elected City Council is facing cuts that would essentially render them politically nonexistent.
Outside of downtown half of the street lights remain off. The antiquated public transportation system sees no improvement on the horizon. People wait for long periods for buses which are in desperate need of repair and replacement.
The system of emergency management has created no jobs for working people. A Financial Advisory Board (FAB) which was instituted as a result of the now-defunct Financial Stability Agreement (FSA) is still intact. When some City Council members called for the removal of this unnecessary expense, Kevyn Orr, the Emergency Manager (EM), said that he needed the FAB for advice and counsel on financial matters.
With the appointment of an EM by Gov. Snyder, the FSA which created the FAB, should have been null and void. In a 5-4 vote of the City Council on April 4, 2012, the FSA was adopted in order to avoid the installation of an EM.
Yet only ten months later, Snyder scraped the FSA and imposed a “dictator” over the city of Detroit who has the last say over all decisions made by both Mayor Bing and the City Council. The only thing that is sacrosanct for the EM is the payment of debt-service to the banks who claim that Detroit owes in excess of $16 billion to the same institutions that destroyed the city through predatory mortgage lending and the issuing of equally fraudulent municipal loans and bond deals.
Kevyn Orr’s old law firm, Jones Day, is currently working to supposedly restructure the debt owed by the city. This is being done absent of any public debate, decisions by City Council, or the residents.
Any plans to restructure the debt by the EM will only be carried out in the interest of the banks and the corporations. The needs of the people are never taken into consideration by Gov. Snyder, Orr and Mayor Dave Bing who welcomed the appointment of the EM last month.
On April 16, the City Council was presented with a fait accompli: either you voluntarily approve a contract with Jones Day or have one rammed down the throats of the people. Any notions of a conflict of interest or lack of an open bidding process is never raised by the corporate media which champions the virtues of bankers’ rule every day.
Moratorium NOW! Coalition Calls for Mass Meeting on May 4
Since the Moratorium NOW! Coalition obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit over 3,000 pages of documents from the city on the bond issues and interest-rate swaps which have driven Detroit into financial ruin several articles have been published in the local and national press. A team of Moratorium NOW! Coalition members and volunteers have been pouring over the pages of these contracts to take out relevant information for public consumption.
These essential facts will be presented at a public rally and people’s assembly that will be held on Saturday, May 4 at the Central United Methodist Church. A number of other organizations and leaders have endorsed the gathering giving it a mass character.
Members of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition attended the Detroit chapter of the National Action Network meeting on April 13 that is held weekly at King Solomon Baptist Church. Atty. Jerome Goldberg and visiting UE organizer Dante Strobino from North Carolina won the endorsement of several organizations present at the meeting.
Goldberg reported later at a public Workers World public meeting on the struggle against the recently-passed right-to-work legislation in Michigan, where Strobino was the keynote speaker, saying that “many more people are starting to emphasize the central role of the banks in the crisis. For a long time it was just the Moratorium NOW! Coalition that was pointing this out but now others within labor, the churches and the community are echoing our program.”
The meeting on May 4 will be held based upon the notion that the banks owe the people of Detroit. The leaflet for the assembly stresses that the big banks caused the financial crisis in Detroit with their racist, fraudulent, predatory mortgage loans that resulted in 237,000 people being driven out of the city during the last census period due to home foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs.
This event will call for the prosecution of the financial institutions for conspiring with the bond rating agencies to manipulate interest rates which have saddled Detroit with billions in penalties and continue to loot the city’s tax revenues to inflate their profits. The struggle against emergency management can only take on real meaning when a frontal assault is made on the banks.
The call for the meeting says that within the existing EM law, Public Act 436, the job of Orr is to “make sure that the criminal bankers are paid first. Wages, city services, pensions, Belle Isle (a public park which may be sold to the highest bidder), the Water Department (now being threatened with fragmentation and privatization) are all to be slashed or sold to pay off the $16.9 billion in bogus debt, $4.9 billion of which is interest or profits for the banks.”
On May 4 the Moratorium NOW! Coalition will call upon the people and the city to adopt “The only solution which is to put an immediate halt on the payment of debt-service. The call for the assembly appeals to the people to “fight to restore city services, end pay cuts to city workers, protect pensions and keep valuable city assets—to “put people’s needs before bankers’ greed.”
For more information on the work of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, log on to www.moratorium-mi.org . To view articles written and compiled by the organization and to view the documents released under the FOIA lawsuit visit www.detroitdebtmoratorium.org .
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