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
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
Jun 18, 2012
To justify the consent agreement the state imposed on the city of Detroit, it claimed the city is on the verge of bankruptcy. If so, the state played a big role. First of all, it withheld money the state owes the city. It owes the city 224 million dollars in revenue sharing it agreed to, but hasn’t paid. To make matters worse, the state has reduced revenue sharing to all cities, costing Detroit another 450 million dollars over the last decade.
Moreover the city and state together have drained city funds to provide tax breaks for big corporations. Even now, in the midst of a so-called budget crisis, they are giving money to Cardinal Health, which wants to build a medical supplies distribution center on land Henry Ford Hospital snatched up. And they handed out more money for Whole Foods to build a store in downtown Detroit.
Both the state and the city have been handing out billions to wealthy bourgeois who run the state, like the son-in-law of Max Fisher, who is one of the land-grabbers linked to the Whole Foods deal, and corporations like GM, CompuServe, Quicken Loans, and Chrysler.
The purpose of the consent agreement is not to keep the city from bankruptcy, but to continue to use the city budget to hand money over to the big corporations–and to block the city’s population from demonstrating, as people have been doing–angrily.