Moratorium NOW! Coalition Mass Meeting Holds Banks Accountable for Detroit's Financial Ruin

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.

Moratorium NOW! Coalition Mass Meeting Holds Banks Accountable for Detroit’s Financial Ruin

Documents from a FOIA request presented revealing sources of economic crises

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Leading community organizers in the Detroit area addressed a standing room only audience at Central United Methodist Church on May 4 when the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs presented a representative sample of documents related to the bond issues and loans that are at the root of the financial crisis in the city. These documents were released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by David Sole, a retired city employee and former president of UAW Local 2334.

Sole, who is also a co-founder of Moratorium NOW! Coalition, requested the release of all documents from the City of Detroit related to bond deals, loans, contracts with financial institutions, e-mail transactions and all correspondence between the banks and local governmental officials.

The request was made in January, but it would take the filing of a lawsuit by Atty. Jerome Goldberg to win the release of some of the documents requested. Since the documents were released in March, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition has set up a task force to sift through over 3,000 pages of materials including the terms and conditions of bonds issued by the city as well as the payment schedules and termination agreements associated with these transactions.

At the meeting on May 4, the first section was chaired by Debbie Johnson of Moratorium NOW! Coalition who stressed the significance of what the gathering was designed to accomplish. She noted that the appointment of an emergency manager represented the culmination of years of attacks against the city of Detroit and its majority African American population.

Johnson introduced Helen Moore, a longtime education activist, who was the founder of Black Parents for Quality Education in 1971. The organization fought racism within the-then white-dominated public school system in Detroit.

Moore also opposed the first state takeover of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) in 1999, as the Republican Gov. John Engler seized control of the district and ran into virtual bankruptcy by 2004 when it was ostensibly returned to local control. Recently Moore successfully filed a federal civil rights complaint against the appointment of two emergency managers, Robert Bobb in 2009 and later Roy Roberts, a retired General Motors executive in 2011.

“The appointment of the emergency managers has not led to the elimination of the debt or the improvement of education in the district,” Moore emphasized. Since the imposition of emergency management over the DPS for the first time in 1999, over 130,000 students have been forced out of the public schools, and more than 100 school buildings have been closed along with the elimination of thousands of education sector jobs.

Impact of Banks on Municipal Government

The second half of the program was chaired by Andrea Egypt of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition who spoke on her own personal and work experience through the prism of the devastation caused by the banks in the communities and within municipal government. Egypt has worked for the City of Detroit for more than two decades and reflected on the changes that have taken place during this time period.

Atty. Vanessa Fluker, one of the foremost experts and proponents of anti-foreclosure litigation in the United States, was given a standing ovation when she was introduced to the audience. Fluker noted that the banks plotted to target African American and Latino/as communities in Detroit and throughout the country for systematic fraud that reaped tremendous profits for the leading financial and insurance firms in the country.

Fluker noted that these actions had even been documented in a 600plus-page report issued by Michigan Senator Carl Levin. She implored the audience to continue the struggle against the banks and to mobilize the hundreds of thousands in to Detroit to fight back against the worsening conditions in the city.

Later City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson was introduced as the people’s councilperson. Watson was one of four councilpersons who voted against the financial stability agreement that was imposed by Gov. Rick Snyder on Detroit on April 4, 2012.

Watson has been an indefatigable opponent of emergency management. She recently was one of two City Council members who voted against the awarding of a $3.3 million contract to Jones Day law firm to purportedly negotiate the restructuring of the debt service. Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager, is a former partner at Jones Day.

This extremely popular elected official noted that Atty. Jerome Goldberg was invited by her to meet with the newly-appointed city emergency manager Kevyn Orr when he first arrived in Detroit. Watson denounced the corporate takeover of the city and praised the work of Moratorium NOW! Coalition.

Another speaker during this section of the event included Mike Shane who presented a power point presentation which methodically exposed that a combination of predatory mortgage lending, credit default swap municipal loans, and the systematic disempowerment of the majority African American population created the conditions for the total usurpation of political power by the state officials acting on behalf of the interests of capital. Shane also pointed out the support that Moratorium NOW! Coalition received from at least two prominent law firms and two national labor unions in scanning, categorizing and analyzing the contents of the documents received through the FOIA request.

These documents have been placed on a website entitled detroitdebtmoratorium.org which is linked to the moratorium-mi.org site of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition. Various news articles have been published in response to the posting of the documents by the Detroit-based Metro Times and the Michigan Citizen as well as Bloomberg News, the Center for Research on Globalization (globalreseach.ca) and Modern Ghana (modernghana.com).

Other speakers at the mass meeting included Elena Herrada, a member of the Detroit Board of Education, whose power has been severely curtailed by the forced takeover by the state. Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Corktown, also addressed the audience on the need for a cancellation of the municipal debt.

Both Herrada and Wylie-Kellerman were arrested in April when they rose to oppose the approval by a 5-2 majority of the Detroit City Council of the above-mentioned contract with Jones Day law firm. Herrada said that the information provided at the meeting would empower their defense during an upcoming trial.

The Moratorium NOW! Coalition mass meeting was endorsed by a number of organization and enjoyed the volunteer support of significant activists throughout the city. These endorsers included the National Lawyers Guild-Detroit chapter, Free Detroit, No Consent, Pastor Edwin Rowe of Central United Methodist Church, who opened the meeting, Detroit Eviction Defense, Rev. Charles Williams II of the Detroit chapter of the National Action Network, Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, the Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice Coalition, among others.

Key volunteers included former State Board of Education member Marianne McGuire and community activist Sharon Feldman. The Michigan Citizen newspaper ran ads advertising the meeting for three straight weeks.

Coming out of the meeting the audience enthusiastically supported a program which accuses the big banks of creating the financial crisis and called for the prosecution of these institutions. The meeting also called for a renewed fight against emergency management understanding that the job of this functionary is to ensure the banks get paid first at the expense of city workers and services.

Finally it was made clear that the only real short term solution is to stop paying the banks for the fraudulent $16.9 billion in debt which is claimed by them against the people of Detroit. Language from the resolution said that “Let’s fight to restore city services, end pay cuts to city workers, protect pensions, stop union busting and keep valuable city assets. Put people’s needs before bankers’ greed.”