How the Political Economies of Capitalism, Racism, and Rightwing Authoritarianism Are Destroying the City of Detroit

http://cityarts.info/2013/03/20/loot-of-the-world/

All,

Much more obviously needs to be said regarding the brutally sustained and relentlessly rapacious corporate, racist, and physical/spiritual/ideological assault on my hometown of Detroit that this article alludes to--and will be very soon by myself and others.  However in the meantime--if you haven't already--please read the following prophetic and truly profound books for the kind of crystalline clarity and essential depth of knowledge that will continue to be desperately needed as we fiercely struggle to save ourselves and all that we love and cherish from the absolutely ruthless and deadly forces of Capital and Plutocracy that are destroying this society and the rest of the world right before our very eyes...and pass the word...Our very lives depend upon it...

Kofi


THE ORIGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS:  RACE AND INEQUALITY IN POSTWAR DETROIT
by Thomas J. Sugrue.  Princeton University Press,  1996

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein.  Metropolitan Books  (Henry Holt and Company),  2007
 
DETROIT:  I DO MIND DYING  A Study in Urban Revolution
by Dan Georgakas and Martin Surkin.   South End Press,  1975.  Updated second edition, 1998

FLAT BROKE IN THE FREE MARKET:  How Globalization Fleeced Working People
by Jon Jeter.  W.W. Norton,  2009

PLANET OF SLUMS.  by Mike Davis.  Verso,  2007

DEMOCRACY, INC.:  Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. by Sheldon S. Wolin.  Princeton University Press,  2008

Loot of the World

by Emma Lockridge
March 20, 2013
City Arts:  New York's Review of Culture
  

Fate of Detroit’s premier art museum serves warning to the nation

The collective spirit of financially beleaguered Detroiters mirrors a declaration from Celie in The Color Purple: “I’m poor, black, my situation is ugly, but God, I’m still here.” While the people stay put in Motown, will the city’s art museum survive a fiscal meltdown or be dismantled?


In response to ongoing deficits and long-term debt, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has used an unpopular state law to appoint an Emergency Manager [EM] to right the ship in Motown. The EM supplants Detroit’s elected officials, including the mayor and city council, and can renegotiate union contracts, eliminate departments, declare a municipal bankruptcy and sell city-owned assets.

Assets? The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the nation’s finest urban museums and a most beloved gem for Detroiters, could be put into play. People are concerned that the museum’s coveted collection could fall prey to art vultures to lower the city’s deficit. With more than a billion dollars in city-owned artwork that includes Van Gogh, Monet and Cézanne, speculation is brewing about whether the art would be sold, or pillaged as some think, to help meet Detroit’s deficit. Clarity on the art’s fate is hard to find.

“Anything of value will be looted. Detroiters will have nothing left,” is the view of longtime Detroit artist/activist Ifoma. “New Orleans had a natural disaster and got help. We’re having a disaster by neglect.”

Ifoma may have a point. When New York City was on the brink of financial ruin in 1975, then President Gerald Ford approved a $2.3 billion federal loan during a national recession. That same loan would total around $10 billion today. Detroit allegedly has a $327-million accumulated deficit and $14.1 billion in long-term bond debt, but there is no talk of a lifeline from Washington.

Detroit’s economic demise has registered on the radar of a street artist who has taken credit for a controversial sign reading “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” installed at the defunct Packard Automotive Plant in the city. Translated from German, the “Work Will Set You Free” was posted over entryways of concentration camps. The activist artist, using the pseudonym Penny Gaff, issued an explanation on Facebook.

“ARBEIT MACHT FREI was cruelly placed at the entrances of the labor camps in irony, with the knowledge that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, no hope, only death,” Penny Gaff posted. “We whore our lives away day after day for corporations and the empty promises of the powers that be. We have become wage slaves, with no alternative, essentially reinstating forced labor.”

It was Detroit’s labor that wildly enriched some of the 20th Century’s wealthy manufacturing barons who donated artwork to the city’s main museum. Manufacturing has significantly dwindled and now the art may follow the painful exodus along with the sanctity of the people’s vote and their hope for self-determination.

Emma Lockridge is a freelance writer based in Detroit. She enjoys street art and visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Structural Racism and the Ongoing Financial War On African American Consumers

Josh Anderson for The New York Times
Henry E. Hildebrand III, a Chapter 13 trustee in Nashville, says the system needs to be changed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/business/blacks-face-bias-in-bankruptcy-study-suggests.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

"Who are we? Where are we going? What are we here for?"

--Amus Mor "Poem to the Hip Generation"

All,

A series of (rhetorical) questions: What does this article tell you about the vicious reality of blatant institutional racism and class exploitation in America today? What does this tell you about the doctrines of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony in this country and its ongoing venal power in the 21st century? What does this tell you about the dire absence of any effective national grassroots political strategy and visionary radical leadership among African Americans to directly combat this massive problem? What does this tell you about the bizarre complicity and utterly passive-aggressive "contentment" of so many black citizens (as well as all other Americans!) with an economic system in which well over 20% of the national black adult population is currently unemployed (the highest rate since the Great Depression of the 1930s!)? Why do we continue-- despite all our isolated verbal complaints to the contrary--to fatalistically put up with a supine Presidency, an obstructionist Congress, and the withering indifference of BOTH national political parties that categorically REFUSES to do anything substantive about an explosive increase in poverty in the United Hates generally over the past 30 years (and especially over the past decade)? Why do we keep pretending that it's "all gonna get better eventually" simply if we elect the "right man" for President in 2012? How many more of us will have to lose our jobs, our homes, our savings, our pensions, our rights, and our lives before we make up our collective mind to actively DO something about this relentless crisis?

Finally: What is to be done? And who's gonna do it?...

Kofi


Blacks Face Bias in Bankruptcy, Study Suggests
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
January 20, 2012
New York Times

Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found.

The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially, in part because of biases, whether conscious or unconscious.

The vast majority of debtors file under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, which typically allows them to erase most debts in a matter of months. It tends to have a higher success rate and is less expensive than the alternative, Chapter 13, which requires debtors to dedicate their disposable income to paying back their debts for several years.

The study of racial differences in bankruptcy filings was written by Robert M. Lawless, a bankruptcy expert and law professor, and Dov Cohen, a psychology professor, both with the University of Illinois; and Jean Braucher, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

A survey conducted as part of their research found that bankruptcy lawyers were much more likely to steer black debtors into a Chapter 13 than white filers even when they had identical financial situations. The lawyers, the survey found, were also more likely to view blacks as having “good values” when they expressed a preference for Chapter 13.

“Unfortunately I’m not surprised with these results,” said Neil Ellington, executive vice president of Consumer Education Services, a credit counseling agency in Raleigh, N.C. “The same underlying issues that created the problem in mortgage lending, with minorities paying higher interest rates than their white counterparts having the same loan qualifications, are present in all financial fields.”

The findings, which will be published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies later this year, did not suggest that there was any obvious evidence of discrimination in the bankruptcy process. “I don’t think there is any overt conspiracy,” Professor Lawless said. “But when you have a complex system, these biases can play out and the people within the system don’t see the pattern because nobody is in charge of looking at these big issues.”

Changes in the bankruptcy law in 2005 were intended to force more debtors to file under Chapter 13 and repay some of their debts, but that has not been the effect. In fact, the rate of Chapter 13 filings has remained relatively steady, at about 30 percent. Last year, overall bankruptcy filings were 1.4 million.

Chapter 13 is not always an inferior choice. Many distressed borrowers go that route because they may be able to save their homes from foreclosure. But even that does not explain away the difference: among blacks who did not own their homes, the rate of filing for Chapter 13 was still twice as high as the rate for other races. And the trend persists across the country, beyond regions like the South where Chapter 13 tends to be a more popular option among all debtors (perhaps, in part, because Chapter 13 originated in the South).

If a debtor chooses an inappropriate chapter, there can be serious implications. Chapter 13 plans, for instance, are more likely to fail than a Chapter 7. Nearly two of every three Chapter 13 plans are not completed, which means the filers’ remaining debts are not discharged, leaving them right where they started. One bankruptcy judge, who sees filers once they can no longer make the required payments in the plans, said the debtors usually do not have enough income to stick with the budget.

“They thought they could cut back on this or that, and you might be able to do that for three or four months,” said the judge, C. Ray Mullins, chief judge for the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of Georgia. “But in a Chapter 13, it will be either three or five years. There are certain things you can’t anticipate — a spike in gas prices.”

The study has two parts. One used data from actual bankruptcy cases from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, the most detailed trove of information on filers currently available. The project surveyed 2,400 households nationwide who filed for bankruptcy in 2007.

Results from the second part of the study, which illustrated the lawyer’s influence in determining which bankruptcy chapter to choose, came from a survey sent to lawyers asking them questions based on fictitious couples who were seeking bankruptcy protection. When the couple was named “Reggie and Latisha,” who attended an African Methodist Episcopal Church — as opposed to a white couple, “Todd and Allison,” who were members of a United Methodist Church — the lawyers were more likely to recommend a Chapter 13, even though the two couples’ financial circumstances were identical.

Even though the attorneys’ fees for the more labor-intensive Chapter 13 are more than double the charge for a Chapter 7, some truly distressed debtors will pursue a Chapter 13 anyway, several bankruptcy experts said. That is because they can pay the fee over time, unlike in a Chapter 7, which typically requires a payment before the case is filed. If blacks are perceived as less likely to have the resources — or a family with resources — to come up with a lump sum, some lawyers may be inclined to suggest a Chapter 13, these experts suggested.

But Professor Lawless said he and the other researchers accounted for this possibility in their results. As to the possibility that unscrupulous attorneys could push Chapter 13 filings in an attempt to get higher fees, Professor Lawless said that effect should be apparent across all races.

He said the study has no information about whether other players in the process — judges and bankruptcy trustees, among others — were contributing to the difference in filings rates.

William E. Brewer Jr., president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, and a practicing lawyer in Raleigh, N.C., disputed the premise of the study that Chapter 13 was always more burdensome and always required debtors to pay more to their creditors. “The study does not adequately control for the numerous complex factors that dictate chapter choice,” he said. “Having said this, Nacba intends to present the study to its members for discussion and self-reflection.”

Other, more limited studies have also shown the higher incidence of Chapter 13 among blacks. In Chicago, the Woodstock Institute, a research and policy group, reported last May that in mostly black communities in Cook County, nearly half the cases from 2006 to 2010 were filed under Chapter 13, compared with 32.8 percent of all cases filed in the county. “For people of color, who historically have fewer assets, preservation of assets is a top priority,” said Tom Feltner, vice president at Woodstock, who added that lawyers often have a financial incentive to push Chapter 13 filings. “It is possible that the higher levels of Chapter 13 in communities of color can be explained by a combination of higher attorney’s fees and a filer’s desire, or advice that elevates a filer’s desire, to preserve as many assets as possible.”

Henry E. Hildebrand III, who has served as a Chapter 13 trustee in Tennessee for 30 years, said he had noticed that blacks and other minorities appeared to be overrepresented in Chapter 13 cases. “We should focus not on picking apart the conclusions,” Mr. Hildebrand said, “but use this study as an indication that we should be attempting to fix what has become a complex, expensive, unproductive system.”

Economist Richard Wolff On the Actual Reality of the U.S. Political Economy and the Ideological Conflict Over National Priorities

Prior to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) speaking at a news conference about his bill to extend the debt ceiling, field recorders are laid out on top of a podium, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 28, 2011. The political posturing around the debt ceiling "crisis" has distracted from the hard issues underlying US economic decline. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

http://www.truth-out.org/tale-two-lootings/1312292014

All,

Actual Truth and Consequences in the realm of the contemporary U.S. political economy or social Reality vs. Fantasy...

Kofi


A Tale of Two Lootings
3 August 2011
by Richard D. Wolff
Truthout | News Analysis


The political posturing around the debt ceiling "crisis" was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those - underlying US economic decline - keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes - two long-term trends over the last 30 years - help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.

The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government's budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government's broken budget.

The first trend amounts to looting the US working class (the media softens that to "disappearing middle class"). Since the 1970s, real wages have been flat to declining, while productivity per worker has risen steadily. What employers give workers (wages) has remained the same while what workers produce for their employers (profits) rose. Workers and their families responded by working ever more hours and borrowing ever more money to get or keep the "American dream." By 2007, they were physically exhausted, families emotionally stressed and deeply anxious about the debts that their flat real wages could no longer sustain. When the system crashed, zooming unemployment, further wage and benefit reductions and home foreclosures made everything still worse for most Americans.

The second trend was looting the government. This happened because exhausted and stressed workers turned away from participation or even political interests after the 1970s. In contrast, employers used the profits made possible by flat wages and rising productivity to buy politicians, parties and policies. More than ever before, businesses and top executives grabbed the levers of political power. They made government serve their interests. Starting in the 1980s, Washington lowered business taxes, deregulated businesses, cut taxes on executives' and other high incomes, increased spending on the military-industrial and medical-insurance complexes, provided more opportunities and freedom for financial speculation, and so on. To distract people from recognizing, debating, or opposing this political shift, more was also spent on social programs and supports.

Washington was thus deprived of tax revenues (chiefly on corporations and the richest individuals) while spending more on defense, business supports and social programs. As this gap between revenues and expenditures rose, Washington kept borrowing ever more. Rising annual budget deficits added to the national debt. When the private capitalist system crashed in 2007, business and the rich made sure the government spent vast sums to bail out banks, insurance companies and large corporations and to revive the stock market. Accordingly, government deficits and debts zoomed upward.

Business and the rich made trillions from both trends. By keeping workers' wages flat, profits soared as employers alone kept the full fruits of rising worker productivity. Employers and the rich profited further by getting Washington to lower their taxes. They then lent at interest to the government what they no longer needed to pay in taxes. After all, the government needed to borrow precisely because it had stopped taxing corporations and the rich at the rates of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Business and the rich happily financed a political system that converted their tax obligations into secure, well-rewarded loans to the government instead.

Looting the working class and the state widened the gap between rich and poor in the US to what it was a century ago. Now the corporations and the rich want the state, whose budget they looted, to cut back social supports and services for the working class whose wages and productivity they also looted.

Republicans yell "class warfare" against advocates of a return to the 1940s tax rates on business profits, and the 1950s and 1960s rates on high-income individuals. Both were far higher than they are today. "Class warfare" better describes government policies since the 1970s. Business and the rich made sure those policies shifted the burden of federal taxation from business to individuals and from rich individuals to everyone else.

Despite this double looting of working people and the state, many victims direct their anger at the government instead of those who control the government. Unemployed millions fired by private capitalist employers (or suffering wage and benefits cuts imposed by them) blame the government, not their employers. Millions foreclosed out of their homes by private capitalist banks blame the government. They want the government punished, made smaller and weaker, and they are desperate to avoid further taxes. Republicans promise to do all that. Those who fear that a smaller, tax-starved government will do even less for them hear Democrats promising to cut less than Republicans. This is politics disconnected from economic realities (for example, high unemployment) and twisted into a contest between more and less government spending cuts imposed on a working class already reeling from economic crisis.

Neither party dares to return taxes on corporations and the rich to what they were. Neither party dares to advocate that government hire the unemployed to rebuild the US, to spend their government-job wages on maintaining their mortgages (reviving the housing industry) and thereby stimulate the whole economy from the bottom up. Above all, neither party dares admit that so long as production remains in the hands of tiny groups of rich shareholders and boards of directors, they will keep looting the system.

Can the US do better than this capitalist system's performance? We need to debate honestly and decide whether and how we can do better. We should have had the courage to debate that over the last 50 years. The cold war - and the priorities of corporations and the rich - prevented that. Now it's long overdue. We need new political organizations mobilizing people to demand and engage that debate, theoretically and also in practical, political struggles.



RICHARD D. WOLFF

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne).

Why The President Must Awaken From His Present Political Coma--And What It Means for 2012

President Barack Obama during a news conference about debt ceiling negotiations, July 29, 2011. (Photo: Philip Scott Andrews / The New York Times)

http://www.truth-out.org/president-reverse/1312300026

All,

All I can say here is WAKE UP MR. PRESIDENT because your present political course/coma is helping no one but our mutual enemies...

Kofi


A President in Reverse Tuesday
2 August 2011
by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

"Obama's starting point was a demand for a "clean," unencumbered bill to raise the ceiling; House Speaker John Boehner said no. What would have happened if Obama refused to budge? We don't know because that's not his style. It would be nice, someday, to find out."

-- Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post, 8/1/2011

The United States of America is different today, different in a fundamental and dramatic way, and is a better place now only for a few thousand people who are rich enough to remain above the effect of this transformation. For the rest of us, the 99% who stay up nights worrying about health care bills, retirement, finding a job, keeping a job, and aging parents who now dangle above a deliberately frayed safety net, it is a colder and more dangerous country we call home.

If I hear one more person try to tell me the deal cut between Congress and the White House was as good as we can expect, that it isn't all bad, I might vomit on them. This whole thing has been a disaster, and no amount of spin can alter the fact. Mr. Obama has taken to the habit of abject retreat with such gusto that he should be outfitted with one of those beeping devices they put on trucks to alert people when they go in reverse. At least that way, we will have some warning the next time this Democratic president backs away from the very policies and priorities he was elected to protect and defend.

We sure could have used such a signal during this debt-fight calamity.

I want a clean debt bill. Beep-beep-beep, never mind.

I want, no, I demand revenue enhancements - not from new taxes, but from closing loopholes - and I will reject any bill that does not include them. Beep-beep-beep, forget I said that.

We must protect Social Security and Medicare. Beep-beep-beep, but now I look good to Independent voters, or something, right?

It has become an all too familiar sound, really.

I will close Guantanamo. Beep-beep-beep.

There needs to be a public option in the health care reform bill. Beep-beep-beep.

The Bush-era tax cuts? Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.

An interesting thing happens when someone backs up. They get smaller in your vision, receding slowly but surely until they are all but invisible. So it is with this president, who goes into the 2012 election season a small fraction of the man who would supposedly make history.

George W. Bush took the historic budget surplus left by President Clinton and squandered it on tax cuts, further enriching those few thousand people who didn't need the money. Mr. Bush delivered us into crushing debt with two interminable wars, which many of those few thousand people continue to profit from wildly. A number of those people - the Wall Street and banking magnates - are directly and personally responsible for the recklessness and greed that very nearly annihilated the American economy, and as of this date, not only have they eluded justice for their crimes, but have been richly rewarded.

They were rewarded again with this bill. Try to spin it any other way, and you're wasting your time with me. They were rewarded, and the weight of that reward will fall on your neck and mine. Again.

As bad as this situation is, it could have been a great deal worse. "Cut, Cap and Balance" would have blown the economy to the far side of the moon, as would Boehner's initial failed attempt at this legislation. There are cuts to the defense budget, and the social safety net did not take it in the teeth as savagely as the berserkers within the GOP caucus desired. And, yes, we did manage to avoid defaulting on the debt limit for the first time in history.

That is hardly the point. In the end, Mr. Obama accepted the premise proffered by the GOP that the debt limit increase had to be tied to massive cuts. This was simply not true, and he failed utterly to make this clear. He demanded new tax revenues from closed loopholes be part of the deal, and then surrendered that position. He swore to protect the social safety net, and spent virtually the entire debate trying to give it away.

This was not a case of two steps forward and one step back, but was instead no steps forward and two steps back. The kind of cuts included in this bill are exactly, precisely the wrong medicine for an ailing economy, and for the people who make up that economy. We now stare down the yawning barrel of a double-dip recession, and that's only if we're lucky.

Worst of all, Mr. Obama has proven to the Tea Party nutjobs that hostage-taking works, that threatening not only the American economy but the global economy with comprehensive disaster is a proper way to pursue policy initiatives. Imagine if a member of the House Insanity Caucus had broken into a nuclear missile silo and threatened to launch unless Reagan's face was carved on Mt. Rushmore...and got what he wanted, and was allowed to go free.

What's next? You really think they won't try this again at the first opportunity? Of course they will, and why not? It worked like a charm.

They got away with it, just like Mr. Bush and his cronies got away with lying us into war while bankrupting the country, just like the "defense" contractors who skimmed billions from the war funding, just like the Wall Streeters and banksters who stole our future from us.

They got away with it, and so they will try it again somewhere down the road...and there will be Mr. Obama, receding slowly into the distance. Again.