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This article is part three of a three-part series.
DETROIT — No, it is not true. Detroiters NEVER filed for bankruptcy, and we never would.
The Republican Michigan Governor, spurred on by his corporate buddies, seized onto this current crisis, then suggested the current solution. We don’t want our city and our assets sold off to corporate interests as they salivate, targeting what we have built up over 300 years of development. This entire Emergency Manager issue is a scam that is being engaged to access Detroit and make it a border town along the river, where they can control commerce between America and Canada.
Billionaires taking junkets to Detroit in search of lake-front property they can buy and turn into playgrounds for the rich are all too common occurrences. Even our beloved Belle Isle, the place where residents have always gone with our families to enjoy nature and outside events, is part of the Detroit fire sale – and we are fighting angry.
Technology is replacing hundreds of thousands of workers and this had made a tremendous impact on our quality of life. Hospitals closed, what a sight to see! Major hospitals open, with entire floors of empty hospital beds, while the emergency rooms on the first floor explode with indigent ill persons.
President Obama’s “Affordable Healthcare Act” is the first medical initiative that the country has seen, and it is far from Universal Healthcare, which is what we all need. The extension of healthcare to all Americans is fought at every level.
The country should look at Detroit to see and better understand what is coming to other states which are experiencing the introduction of mass technology, and see what it means to local economies. What we are witnessing is the frantic attempt by the 1% to make things work for them, when they are the reason for the layoffs, all over the world. They are in a hopeless situation—trying to maintain maximum profits as they lay off workers, who now cannot buy what the computers and robots manufacture. Their desperation is expressed as fascism, the last attempt to manage and control by destroying democracy, destroying unions, encouraging violence, disrupting voting rights, making middle income workers face poverty, making the poor poorer, etc.
The American worker is in full disarray and unsure about what steps to take next in the face of these mounting attacks. Few voices are demanding universal healthcare that covers all. Few voices are raising the call for zero homelessness. Few voices are demanding accessible public education for all children.
The country is under attack by these corporate pirates who are demanding that their standard of living gets better while the 99% loses ground. Civility is lost between opposing viewpoints, and now we are witness to a national act of violence in the form of the not guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin case.
We will sink further and further into the depths of destruction if we continue to allow our sense of social justice and humanity to be destroyed by the rise of these corporate pirates. They took pensions, but I said nothing because mine was not touched. They passed Stand Your Ground laws, but I said nothing because my children were not harmed. They closed hospitals, but I said nothing because I wasn’t sick. We all know what happened next…
