The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Massive Power Outage Puts Detroiters in Danger

Dec 8, 2014

The entire electrical grid of the Detroit Public Lighting system went down for a full day. Nine hundred public buildings, including fire stations and court buildings lost power, and many traffic lights stopped working.

Apparently, the outage was caused by a faulty cable that was more than 50 years old. When the lighting department tried to divert electricity through another circuit, that circuit failed too.

It’s completely barbaric in this day and age for people who live and work in a major city to have to worry that fire stations shut down and traffic lights stop running–because not enough money has been spent on maintaining the power grid. The city has had billions of dollars to pay to the banks and give out huge corporate tax breaks, but no money to maintain its infrastructure.

No worry. The media tells us to just wait; the local private electric company, DTE Energy, is coming to the rescue. All we have to do is wait four years for them to replace the system’s electrical cables. And then, supposedly, this company that will take profits for providing electricity to public buildings will make everything all right.

Don’t bet on it–and in the meantime, expect more outages.