Poor Detroit

[MinM]

Who Sank Detroit – the “Hip Hop Mayor” or Wall Street?

“The Times might as well have run a riff on the old Dixie headline: ‘Black Buck Runs Amuk: Major City Destroyed by Negro Rule.’”

Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit’s former “Hip Hop Mayor,” emerged from behind bars last week, just long enough to be re-embedded in the public mind as the burly, 6’4” personification of all that is wrong with “urban” – i.e. Black – America. The judge sentenced him to 28 years [11] on two dozen counts of racketeering, extortion, bribery and fraud that may have cost the city some tens of millions of dollars during his eight years in office. Yet, the mega-swindle of his career, the $1.4 billion derivatives deal that that could cost Detroit twice that much over the next two decades and represents one-fifth of the city’s total obligations to creditors, appears nowhere in the indictment or sentencing.

In the twisted world of finance-dominated, late-stage capitalism, the 2005 ultra-complex interest rates swap-plus-loans monstrosity that Kilpatrick arranged with Wall Street banks was perfectly legal – as is the convoluted derivatives scheme that Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr plans to submit to a bankruptcy court on behalf of Detroit’s unwilling residents, next week – a formula for the banks to swallow Detroit’s assets whole.

Kilpatrick’s greatest crime against the people of Detroit was committed in league with – or rather, under the detailed and exquisite direction of – Wall Street, and was, therefore, not deemed to be a crime, at all. But the resulting insolvency of a major city requires a Black villain – a Wanted Poster Child, if you will. Kilpatrick fits the bill, the self-made stereotype of Black political venality, perfectly crafted for white supremacist consumption.

“The insolvency of a major city requires a Black villain.”

On the day of his sentencing, the New York Times ran an article that skillfully blurred the relatively more minor crimes for which Kilpatrick was convicted, with the fiscally fatal 2005 derivatives deal, for which he and his Wall Street co-conspirators remain legally blameless. The Times might as well have run a riff on the old Dixie headline: “Black Buck Runs Amuk: Major City Destroyed by Negro Rule.” The story gives the impression that Kilpatrick was finally facing the music for his interest rate swap sins in “a corruption scandal so vast that prosecutors say it helped accelerate Detroit’s march toward bankruptcy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The ex-mayor won’t serve a day for his financial instruments chicanery (for which he was feted on Wall Street and given an award – see the picture at top). Eight years later, Kilpatrick’s derivatives pact with the devils of Wall Street is slated to morph into Kevyn Orr’s derivatives deal and payout to the same parties – leaving a foreign bank in line for possession of everything of value in the city.

In the United States, racism has always been the bankers’ best friend. Mass white supremacism is what put Euro-Americans to “flight” from perfectly good housing in places like Detroit, two generations ago, creating vast “economic development” possibilities in the farmlands surrounding the urban core. The advent of (white) suburbia changed the relationship of housing to the overall economy in the United States, with the banks as the primary beneficiaries.

White racism also allowed Wall Street to impose a subprime mortgage regime on virtually every Black neighborhood in the United States, across the whole spectrum of African American income earners. Years before the housing bubble finally burst, Detroit, by far the Blackest big city in the country, had been irreversibly stripped of its tax base. The Black Buck didn’t run amuk – white men in lower Manhattan and the City of London did.

However, the Black Misleadership Class are perfect foils for the Lords of Capital. Deeply in thrall of power and money, they become helplessly drunk in the presence of banksters. Jefferson County, Alabama, commission president Larry Langford, the former mayor of Birmingham, sank the county in a cesspool of derivatives deals, finally resulting in bankruptcy in 2011. Langford was sentenced to 15 years in prison, not for his scheming with the likes JP Morgan, but for other scams involving criminals of only middling wealth.

“The Black Misleadership Class are perfect foils for the Lords of Capital.”

Langford and Kilpatrick were no more capable of fashioning the fiscal time bombs that blew up their jurisdictions than were Miami’s Liberty City Seven capable of bringing down the Sears Tower. Derivatives are creatures of Wall Street, designed by the bankers that market them for sale to other bankers or to whatever non-banking fools that can be lured into the instruments’ deadly coils, where the victims marinate. The Lords of Capital are preparing for a feast, such as the nation has never seen. But the feeding frenzy cannot begin in earnest until the supporting political narrative is firmly in place. This being America, the justification is ready-made: The irresponsible, profligate, corruption-prone Blacks, with their ghetto pathologies, are the problem. Austerity is the answer – especially in those localities where African Americans are too tightly concentrated – under the firm fiscal management of Wall Street.

A specially selected Negro corporate lawyer, Kevyn Orr – who craves the good life as much as Kwame Kilpatrick and lives in a $5,100 a month penthouse; a gift, he claims, of a rich admirer – will next Wednesday submit to a bankruptcy judge a proposal to restructure Detroit’s debt. The $350 million scheme, financed by Britain’s giant Barclay’s bank, would pay off the Wall Street banks that ensnared (a very willing) Kilpatrick and other Detroit leaders in a web of derivatives and loans. With the original corporate conspirators now made whole, the Brits would then “move to the head of the line,” as people’s lawyer Tom Stephens explains, as Detroit’s super-priority creditor – meaning, Barclays gets paid first when the city’s assets are liquidated or otherwise dispensed.

This is the real crime against the people, and only the people can stop it.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-sank-d ... et/5354837

Don’t Let Jones Day Sell Out Detroit!: Rejecting Kevyn Orr’s Dickensian Vision for Our City

Why the right hates Detroit

Is it pure coincidence that these two landmark cities, known around the world as fountainheads of the most vibrant and creative aspects of American culture, have become our two direst examples of urban failure and collapse? If so, it’s an awfully strange one. I’m tempted to propose a conspiracy theory: As centers of African-American cultural and political power and engines of a worldwide multiracial pop culture that was egalitarian, hedonistic and anti-authoritarian, these cities posed a psychic threat to the most reactionary and racist strains in American life. I mean the strain represented by Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby” (imagine what he’d have to say about New Orleans jazz) or by the slightly more coded racism of Sean Hannity today. As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are allowed to govern themselves.

Direct Rule by Wall Street Begins with Detroit

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A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit
SARAH GOODYEAROCT 25, 2013
A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit Joseph Murphy/Bassett & Bassett

After nearly five years of planning, a large-scale attempt to turn a big chunk of Detroit into an urban forest is now underway. The purchase of more than 1,500 vacant city-owned lots on the city's lower east side – a total of more than 140 acres – got final approval from Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week.

The buyer is Hantz Farms, and it's a venture of financier John Hantz, who lives in the nearby Indian Village neighborhood. Indian Village is an affluent enclave of manor-scale historic homes, but much of the surrounding area is blighted. Hantz Farms will pay more than $500,000 for the land, which consists of non-contiguous parcels in an area where occupied homes are increasingly surrounding by abandoned properties.

The company has committed to clearing 50 derelict structures, cleaning up the garbage dumped across the neighborhood, planting 15,000 trees, and mowing regularly. Planting of the hardwoods will begin in earnest next fall, and the urban forest will be called Hantz Woodlands.


The area that will become the Hantz Woodlands. Photo by Joseph Murphy/Bassett & Bassett

The huge deal drew criticism last year, when the city council – which was then still in control of Detroit – voted 5-4 to approve the sale. A coalition of grassroots urban farmers and community activists opposed it, charging that it was a play to increase land values by buying a huge swath of acreage and taking it off the market. "I think it opens the gateway for other rich folks to come here to buy up land and essentially make themselves rich compounds," urban gardener Kate Devlin told The Huffington Post at the time.

John Hantz agrees. But he thinks that's a good thing. As he told The Atlantic back in 2010:

[T]here’s no reason to buy real estate in Detroit—every year, it just gets cheaper. We’ve gone from 2 million people to 800,000. There are over 200,000 abandoned parcels of land and—by debatable estimates—30,000 acres of abandoned property. We need to create scarcity, because until we get a stabilized market, there’s no reason for entrepreneurs or other people to start buying. I thought, What could do that in a positive way? What’s a development that people would want to be associated with? And that’s when I came up with a farm.
And officials from Hantz Farms argue the city will benefit in other ways as well. As soon as the sale is final, probably some time in the next week or two, Hantz Farms will begin paying property taxes on land that has been off the revenue rolls for years, says Hantz Farms President Mike Score. He also points out that most of the lots have been up for auction at least twice without attracting interest, and that residents of the area were offered the right of first refusal to buy plots adjacent to their homes.

Conditions in the neighborhood, Score says, have been dire, with overgrown sidewalks, piles of refuse, feral dogs, and no streetlights. "Most of the sidewalks aren’t fit to walk on," he says. "I've actually physically cried before, going to work in the dark, seeing mothers walking their kids to school through unmanaged brush and shoulder-high weeds. To go in there and take away most of the danger from the landscape is so satisfying."

"The purpose of the investment is to make the neighborhood more livable and then recover our investment over time."

Score adds that Hantz Farms has already begun mowing about half the property and cleaning up years of trash. And the response his team has gotten from local residents, he says, has been positive. "We’re out every day, and we have yet to meet the first angry neighbor," he says.

He tells a story about a group of residents who asked his mowers to clear a sidewalk so kids could walk safely. After the grass was mowed, Score says, people came out to rake and sweep the clippings aside. Not long after, he noticed a family putting a new roof on a nearby home that he had thought might be destined for abandonment. "That’s the kind of effect we want to see," he says.

Score says that the first phase of planting will be hardwood trees such as maple and oak, planted in straight rows. The Hantz properties will not be fenced, and streets will remain open for passage. After the property is fully cleared, at a cost he estimates at more than $600,000, Score says the company will explore commercial options that might provide jobs for local residents such as orchards, maple syrup, and the cultivation of ornamental plants and shrubbery. For now, he says, his team is working on building trust with neighbors so that when it comes time to discuss subjects such as pesticide use, there's already a relationship.

Score isn’t shy about emphasizing that this is not merely a philanthropic project. "This is designed to be a for-profit enterprise," he says. "I can assure you we have a business plan and we don’t have any anxiety about achieving our goals. We’re entrepreneurs, and that’s really our problem to wrestle with. The purpose of the investment is to make the neighborhood more livable and then recover our investment over time, and we’re very confident we can do that."

In the short term, Score says he thinks the Hantz project will quickly prove its value to Detroit residents.

“We’re going to do this in four years,” he says. "After that we’re going to grow by demand. People I think are going to be saying, we don’t have to live like this anymore. I think we’re going to be growing for a long time."

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014 11:46 AM CDT

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/21/jamie_d ... _ploy_what’s_really_behind_jpmorgans_detroit_investment/

Jamie Dimon’s sinister P.R. ploy: What’s really behind JPMorgan’s Detroit investment
The mega-bank just got great press for its supposed philanthropy. But the real, underlying motive is privatization
DAVID DAYEN

Beware of big banks bearing gifts. That note should be attached to JPMorgan Chase’s much-hyped planned investment of $100 million in the City of Detroit. The move is mostly an effort to boost the embattled bank’s public image, in a part of the country where they have deep roots. But corporate philanthropy like this also hopes for a return on investment – often in the form of the privatization of public infrastructure, which JPMorgan Chase certainly has in its sights.

The $100 million investment in Detroit, spread over a five-year period, comes out to about .1 percent of JPMorgan Chase’s quarterly profits. But it represents one of the more generous corporate commitments to the city, as it attempts to emerge from the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy. The money, split between low-interest loans and grants, will go toward funding community development projects, documenting and eliminating urban blight, providing money for mortgages, training prospective workers and supporting small businesses.

This makes sense for Chase’s bottom line simply because they have a number of branches in Detroit, and over 1 million consumer customers in the region, a legacy going back to the 1930s. A revitalized Detroit helps Chase attract more business, so the bank can do well by doing good. In addition, for a bank that has mostly been in the news of late for paying fines for violating the law, a little shine to their corporate image cannot hurt. “When you’re in a town, you try to be a great citizen there,” CEO Jamie Dimon told the Detroit Free Press.

And if this were only about good corporate citizenship, there would be nothing to worry about. But there’s something far more sinister here. Buried within the commitments is $5.5 million for “strategic initiatives” that includes investing in the M-1 streetcar project, and “bringing the Global Cities Initiative to Detroit.” What is the Global Cities Initiative? Simply put, it’s a giant public relations project meant to encourage the privatization of public resources in cities like Detroit.

The Global Cities Initiative is a joint project of the Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase. The project “aims to help leaders in U.S. metropolitan areas reorient their economies toward greater engagement in world markets,” according to the website boilerplate. Basically, JPMorgan Chase gave Brookings $10 million to provide “objective” recommendations to cities on how they can expand their economies and create jobs. Inevitably, these recommendations include plans for increased foreign investment in cities, global trade links and public-private partnerships.

The chair of the Global Cities Initiative is Richard Daley, the former mayor of Chicago. During his time in office, Daley was a national leader in the privatization of public assets, including the Chicago Skyway and the disastrous sale of the city’s parking meters, where the city gave up 75 years of parking revenue for some up-front cash, only to frustrate residents through endless increases in parking meter rates and additional fees. That parking meter deal may net the investment group backed by Morgan Stanley $9.58 billion on their initial investment of $1.15 billion, which shows you exactly why JPMorgan Chase is so interested in the idea.

Interestingly enough, the partnership between Chase and Daley goes back to another gift, when the bank provided $2.25 million for security cameras in 40 public schools in 2009. At the time, Daley was dogged by a scandal over the beating death of Derrion Albert outside a public school, captured on a cellphone video. The gift from Chase helped ease the pressure on Daley by allowing him to tout his efforts to reduce school violence.

Chase helped Daley in his time of need, and now he’s helping them gather up public assets across the country. For example, Chicago has continued its forays into privatization under new Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And the Global Cities Initiative has been a key partner, brokering a recent deal between Chicago and Mexico City. In short, the Chase-funded, Daley-led Global Cities Initiative moves into cities, and sells them on how to expand their economies in ways that have the potential to fleece the public – and reward banks like JPMorgan Chase.

Indeed, Detroit is currently embroiled in debate over whether to sell off its public assets for much-needed cash to pay off creditors. The city’s emergency financial manager has issued a request for offers to privatize its water system. They’ve already privatized garbage collection, selling that off to two contractors. Banks like JPMorgan Chase are well-positioned to profit from this fire sale, especially if their personally funded Global Cities Initiative whispers in the ear of city leaders, telling them how to best improve their economic circumstances. The bank’s investment in the M-1 streetcar offers another window into their plans, as private donors stand to profit over time from the operation of the transit line.

Right-wing groups are licking their chops at the potential for privatizing public assets in Detroit, and so are the banks that would finance the deals. These sales of public goods like roads or services, which initially get funded through tax dollars, always come with loopholes and unintended consequences. For example, the sale of a state highway in Denver prevents municipalities from improving nearby roads in ways that would reduce the profits of the private road. In the Public Interest, a nonprofit documenting the consequences of privatization, has an excellent report on some of the implications.

Detroit really is another piece of a very large puzzle JPMorgan Chase and other financial giants want to construct around public-private partnerships and seizing the value of assets taxpayers built. “To the extent we can begin to find solutions in a place like Detroit, our hope is that those solutions will be applicable in other places around the country and frankly around the world,” said Peter Scher, JPMorgan’s vice president of corporate responsibility, in a revealing window into the firm’s quest for global domination.

In this context, the investment of $100 million is a pittance compared to the potential profit. Similarly, investing $10 million with Brookings in the Global Cities Initiative makes perfect sense if it steers cities throughout America and abroad into the kind of policy solutions that benefit JPMorgan Chase’s bottom line. At face value, JPMorgan looks like a benevolent benefactor helping Detroit through its time of need. But underneath the surface, they have designs on turning that generosity into profit, at the expense of the region’s citizens.

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Blue Planet et al. Appeal to UN over Detroit Water cut-off to Thousands
By contributors | Jun. 23, 2014 |

By Sarah Lazare
'By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water.'
As thousands of people in Detroit go without water, and the city moves to cut off services to tens of thousands more, concerned organizations have taken the unusual step of appealing to the United Nations to intervene and protect the "human right to water."
“After decades of policies that put businesses and profits ahead of the public good, the city now has a major crisis on its hands," said Maude Barlow, founder of Blue Planet Project and board chair of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water."
The Submission to the Special Rapporteur was released Wednesday by the Detroit People’s Water Board, the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Food & Water Watch.
It calls for the "state of Michigan and U.S. government to respect the human right to water and sanitation" and for shut-offs to be halted, services restored, and water to be made accessible and affordable.
The report comes on the heels of the Detroit's city council's Tuesday approval of an 8.7 percent increase in water rates, part of a long-standing trend that, according to Food & Water Watch, has seen prices increase 119 percent over the past decade.
This rate hike follows an announcement in March by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that it would start turning off water for accounts that are past due. According to a late May Director's Report from the DWSD, there were "44,273 shut-off notices sent to customers in April 2014" alone, resulting in "3,025 shut-offs for nonpayment, and additional collections of $400,000."
Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, who was appointed to power by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in March 2013, has aggressively pursued privatization and austerity measures across the city. "Nothing is off the chopping block, including water utilities, which are being considered for regionalization, sale, lease, and/or public private partnership and are currently subject to mediation by a federal district judge," reads the report.
"The Detroit People’s Water Board fears that authorities see people’s unpaid water bills as a 'bad debt' and want to sweeten the pot for a private investor by imposing even more of the costs of the system on those least able to bear them," the report continues.
Residents say the mass cut-off of this vital service is especially unjust in a city already struggling with high unemployment, a poverty rate near 40 percent, and a foreclosure crisis that has devastated and displaced people across the city, hitting Detroit's African American community especially hard.
"When delinquent corporate water lines are still running without collection of funds, it demonstrates a level of intentional disparity that devalues the lives of the people struggling financially," said Lila Cabbil, President Emeritus of the Rosa Parks Institute, which is part of the People’s Water Board. "Where is our compassion? Where is our humanity?"

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The city has cut off water from at least 27,000 residences this year. Around 10,000 households are without running water.

Imagine Your Water Bill Shooting Up to $4,000: Inside One of Detroit's Biggest Crises
The city has cut off water from at least 27,000 residences this year. Around 10,000 households are without running water.

November 5, 2014 |


Ricardo Russell’s monthly water bill averaged around $60 dollars at his home on Detroit's west side until January when he opened an envelope from the Detroit Water Department that claimed he had used $2,000 worth of water -- in one month.

Russell, 37, went down to the city's water department to ask a representative why his December bill was so high. “The lady thought I owned a business or something,” he told me during one Saturday morning in midtown Detroit in late October. “She asked, ‘Did the business go up? And I said ‘It’s a residential street. it’s a residential house. It’s only me there. There’s nothing abnormal going on.’”

The city representative said she would send someone out to Russell’s home. Meanwhile, he cut off water access to everything in his house, except for the shower and the toilet. The February bill dropped down to $1,150, still well above the $60 he normally paid. When a technician visited Russell’s home, he said there was an issue with the meter and replaced it. Russell went back to the water department to see if he could get his bill reduced, and was told to hire a plumber to see if a pipe was broken. Russell hired a plumber, who charged $150 an hour, to check all of the pipes in the home.

The plumber found a pipe the size of a spoon with a crack in it that was connected outside of his home where the city pulls water into Russell’s home, he said. The plumber replaced that pipe and Russell’s water bill shot down to $40 the next month. But when Russell asked the water department if the balance on his bill could be reduced, he was told there was nothing that could be done for him. He says he was placed on a payment plan that required him to pay twenty percent of his total bill upfront and the rest in monthly installments for the remaining eleven months. Ricardo’s bill was more than $4,000 at that point, so he had to pay at least $400 immediately.

Russell worked in technical support management before having to leave his job on disability and is currently enrolled as a full time PhD student at Central Michigan University. He wasn’t making enough money to make an up front payment and he claims the representative told him he either had to make a payment immediately or risk having his water cut off.

“I came up with the $400 because I didn’t want the water cut off,” he said. “Because if they cut the water off then they charge you to put the water back on. It’s crazy.”

That is how most Detroiters see the state of affairs in their city. Crazy.

The city has cut off water from at least 27,000 residencies this year and around 10,000 households don’t have any running water, according to Al Jazeera. The constant refrain from city officials has been that the city has to shore up as much revenue as possible to recover from its bankruptcy filing.

Lawyers on behalf of city residents sued to halt the shutoffs, but bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes ruled that he didn’t have the power to reverse the shutoffs taking place in Detroit, according to the Detroit News. Protesters had been arguing that water was a human right but Rhodes didn’t agree.

“There is no such right or law,” he said during his ruling at the end of September.

If you live outside of Detroit, you're likely to get the impression that most of the people who haven’t paid their water bills are simply a bunch of poor people. The media is out there promoting that line: During an MSNBC broadcast this summer, local television reporter Hank Winchester said that “…there are many residents in need but, and this is where it gets controversial, who simply don’t want to pay the water bill, who’d rather spend money on cable.” In that particular instance the viewing public heard a rare counter to Winchester's claim on air Maureen Taylor, Chair of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, would have none of it:

“Before I answer that let me say, ‘Shame on [Winchester]. Shame on him for putting that lie ... and that disinformation out on the air. To suggest that people don’t want to pay for a water bill is scandalous. What is at stake here is that there are tens of thousands of low-income families who cannot pay rising water bill costs. The cost of living is going up. The chances of living are going down. And we’ve got these reporters out here, like this guy, that’s just standing on the side of the people that have money.”

During my 10-day visit to Detroit, a city in which I was born and raised, that was the general sentiment I heard about the water crisis from dozens of people with whom I spoke: That the media was siding with the power brokers.

But their frustrations don’t end at the tap.

“You can’t isolate the water shutoffs from the fact that sixty percent of the kids here live in poverty,” Sam Riddle, a longtime political insider, told me during a visit at the offices of the Michigan Chronicle where he writes as a columnist. “We have one of the highest infant mortality [rates of] anywhere on the planet. This isn’t rhetoric. These are the ugly realities of what it is to have two Detroits: a Detroit where the PR machine is flourishing, talking about the great comeback of Detroit when you’ve got another Detroit which has literally an economic wall around it.”

That economic wall he is referring to is the rapidly developing midtown section of Detroit, where very little of the economic blight that is seen or heard about in nation media can be found. Around that wall, however, are all of the negative realties you’ve heard about.

There is a sense from long-time residents that they are being left behind. First, by the city officials they elect into office and then by the state, an entity the city has never really had good relations with since the 1967 riots. Or, as most Detroiters would put it, when the city became black after white residents fled to the suburbs.

Detroiters are a very proud people and will direct a fiery retort towards anyone they feel misrepresents their city -- just as Taylor did on national television. Indeed, if you drive around most parts of Detroit, much of what you have read about the Motor City is true. One can drive blocks and see streets full of abandoned homes and neighborhoods so dark that one would have to turn on the bright lights on his or her car to see into the distance ahead. But on those same streets are hardworking people who barely reflect the stereotypical Detroiters who don’t care about their communities.

One Friday afternoon, I visited a longtime neighbor, Diane who is a retired autoworker, on Scotten Avenue where I lived until the age of 18. She maintains her home and pays her bills. I lived four homes down from her, but vacant lots have replaced those houses. She and another neighbor pay to keep the grass cut in that space and other vacant lots on the street. “All he wants is gas money for the lawnmower,” she told me about the man who refuses to take cash payments for his work.

Not all the homes have incomes like hers, but that doesn’t mean that they are devoid of pride and perseverance. For example, right next to a dilapidated home is another that is so meticulously manicured, one might think that Vincent van Gogh rose from the dead, switched his paint brush for a lawnmower and shears, and worked his magic.

There are neighborhoods in Detroit like the University District on the city’s west side, where no signs of the city’s decay are present. It is an upper-middle class community where retired civil servants, lawyers, doctors and other white and blue collar professionals live. My Godmother, Rosa Stephens, has been a resident of the neighborhood for more than 30 years. A former high school administrator who taught in the Detroit Public School system for nearly 30 years, she resurrected the first block club in her neighborhood. For more than 36 years, neighbors have volunteered their time to patrol the streets.

Rosa also trained some of her students and entered them into city and statewide oratorical competitions. I was one of her students who would go on to win scholarships for college from some of those competitions. Dozens of students would benefit from her tutelage and go on to be productive citizens of Detroit. Like my neighbor Diane, Rosa doesn’t plan on moving out of Detroit, either.

Yet the city has seen a drastic drop in population since I last lived there in 1998 when I finished high school. Right now, 688,701 people call the Motor City home. There were 951,270 people in the city in 2000, a more than 20 percent drop; 1990 was the last year the city had more than one million people. Back in 1960, more than 1.8 million people lived in Detroit.

Many of my friends and former teachers no longer live in the city. here are many reasons for this: lack of employment opportunities, car insurance costs, better jobs elsewhere, crime, enclosing dilapidation around their well-kept homes, no faith in the city. The last part seems to be a deciding factor for most people I spoke to.

Without question, Detroit’s political and economic climate has been the most tumultuous of any major city in America. Detroit filed for bankruptcy this year, the first major city to do so in U.S. history. The Detroit Public School system is under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. Its police force, though lead by a new, competent chief according to most accounts, pays its police officers so little money, officers at Wayne State University, a local city college, make more money than city cops.

On the political scene, many of its politicians and city workers have been sent to the slammer after being convicted on federal and local corruption charges. Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a man many thought would run for President someday, is serving more than 40 years in federal prison on corruption charges. Charles Pugh, former City Council President abandoned his post after allegations that he had an improper relationship with a minor surfaced; supposedly, he is busting tables in Harlem. Several council members who ran on reforming the city served one term and left. Saunteel Jenkins left her council seat during her second term and took a job at a non-profit that reportedly pays more than double her salary. While there was nothing illegal about her move, there is a feeling that no one in power is willing to rough ride for Detroiters who have devoted their lives to the city.

During a conversation with my godmother, I asked her why do Detroiters continue to vote people into office who don’t seem to care about them or are devoted to serving the city long-term. She replied with a common response I heard from most residents I spoke to during my stay: “What choices do we have?”

On October 19, representatives from the United Nations sat on a panel at a town hall at Wayne County Community College in downtown Detroit, along with other local leaders in media, academic and activism to hear more than 300 residents share grievances about their water issues. None of the people at that townhall I attended came across as fiscally irresponsible people, but they all shared an emotion that resonates around Detroit: a sense of abandonment by their elected officials and a state that doesn’t seem to think that they are capable of empowering themselves.

One resident after the other stepped to the microphone to express how they were burdened with water bills they felt they weren’t legally obligated to pay. One resident said her bill shot up because neighbors were siphoning water from the spigot from the side of her home. Others claimed that the city set them up on payment plans that weren’t proportional to their incomes. Tijuana Morris stepped up to the microphone and told the audience that the water department outright charged for water she never used.

October 31 of 2000, Morris, a retired ex-cop with the Detroit Police Department, lost her home in a fire and moved into an apartment. Over a four-month period, she received bills for water usage at the home. She said that she made sure to call the water department to shut off her water at her burned down home, as she was no longer in the residence. She says she was still forced to pay.

Of course, the burning of her home strained her finances. Morris says the insurance company would not insure her home because her home suffered too much damage. She filed for bankruptcy in 2005, which made her situation worse. During all of this, Morris had to deal with a water company that she says charged her for water that she never used. After four years, the bill was finally resolved -- but the ordeal ruined her credit and she is still feeling the wounds from that battle. And Morris was one of the thousands of retired cops who had her medical benefits eliminated this spring as part of Detroit’s efforts to clear debt to pull itself out of bankruptcy. Much of her pension goes to covering her medical costs. Morris says during the four years she tried to resolve her water bill, she would constantly called the water department but get no return calls.

And when she did meet representatives, she found them to be unresponsive and inflexible. Even when she attended city council meetings, she says she found it hard to find get people to address her concerns about the water department. Such is the life of navigating the city bureaucracy, she says.

“When people continuously go and try to resolve things, they get a deaf ear,” Morris told me one a Friday afternoon at a downtown café. “And some people say, ‘What’s the point? They aren’t going to listen.’”

AlterNet made several phone attempts to reach the Detroit Water Department for comment but got no response.

Morris, the retired cop who did all she was suppose to do in life, and all of the retirees in Detroit who pay their taxes but feel like their efforts aren’t returning the political and governmental benefits they deserve are rarely the ones you hear about in mainstream media.

It’s usually the stereotypical black “welfare moms” who’d rather spend money on hair and cable than pay their utility bills. In reality, the financial strains on Detroit are trickling down on everyone.

For those who claim Detroiters have themselves to blame for the city's decline, consider how challenging it is to just navigate the city if you don't have a car. Bus routes have been cut to the bone -- it is almost impossible to get around Detroit without a vehicle. Just imagine how many Detroiters might have been at that water shutoff townhall had public transportation comparable to Chicago, New York City or Washington, D.C., been available. Nearly 40 percentof Detroit’s population lives under the poverty line, so it would be naïve to assume they could have driven there. Also keep in mind that the average American household pays $50 per month for water, but Detroiters pay more than $70 per month despite living in a state that hosts 21 percent of the earth's fresh water supply. The Detroit City Council approved an 8.7 percent water rate increase to help finance repairs for the aging water system. Still, in a city where many Detroiters are struggling, $5 added to a utility bill is significant.

The turmoil we see unfolding in Detroit is not merely the result of a poor, disengaged constituency; it is the breakdown of city government that offers one insufficient service after another and the local population has taken a drumming as a result. L. Brooks Patterson, County Executive for neighboring Oakland County, one of the wealthiest county's in the U.S., has spoken derisively about Detroit for decades. In a New Yorker article, Patterson chided Coleman A. Young, Detroit's first African-American mayor. He also made a racially offensive joke when asked by the reporter how Detroit could fix its financial issues. “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.’”

There are many reports about Detroiters who believe that regional racism is playing a significant role in preventing the city from making an economic comeback. Indeed, the city has its own house to clean but, but based on national media coverage, you would think Detroit is devoid people who fighting against blight and taking multiple buses to hourly jobs hours outside of the city just to make ends meet. Instead of focusing exclusively on population that has been battered economically and politically betrayed, more attention is need on how the state and city officials can work together with residents who are actively working to resurrect their city from the turmoil it is not largely responsible for producing.

Those Detroiters do exist and should be recognized. They are a resilient people whose pride will never allow you see their worst.

That’s why the Dianes of the Detroit always make sure to keep the grass cut.

[seemslikeadream]

Tomgram: Gottesdiener and Garcia, How to Dismantle This Country
Posted by Laura Gottesdiener and Eduardo Garcia at 8:00am, June 9, 2015.

They say that imperial wars come home in all sorts of ways. Think of the Michigan that TomDispatch regular Laura Gottesdiener describes today as one curious example of that dictum. If you remember, in the spring of 2003, George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of that country’s autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein. The invasion was launched with a “shock-and-awe” air show that was meant to both literally and figuratively “decapitate" the country’s leadership, from Saddam on down. At that time, there was another more anodyne term for the process that was also much in use, even if it has now faded from our vocabularies: “regime change.” And you remember how that all worked out, don’t you? A lot of Iraqi civilians -- but no Iraqi leaders -- were killed in shock-and-awe fashion that first night of the invasion and, as most Americans recall now that we’re in Iraq War 3.0, it didn’t get much better when the Bush administration’s proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, disbanded the Iraqi military and Saddam's Baathist Party (a brilliant formula for launching an instant insurgency), appointed his own chosen rulers in Baghdad, and gave the Americans every sort of special privilege imaginable by curiously autocratic decree in the name of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

It now seems that a version of regime change, Iraqi-style, has come home to roost in parts of Michigan -- but with a curious twist. Think of Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, as the L. Paul Bremer of that state. He’s essentially given himself regime-change-style powers, impermeable to a statewide recall vote, and begun dismissing -- or, if you will, decapitating -- the local governments of cities and school districts, appointing managers in their place. In other words, his homegrown version of regime change involves getting rid of local democracy and putting individual autocrats in power instead. What, you might ask yourself, could possibly go wrong, especially since the governor himself is going national to limn the glories of his version of austerity and autocratic politics?

As it happens, TomDispatch dispatched our ace reporter, Laura Gottesdiener, who has been traveling the underside of American life for this site, to check out what regime change in Michigan really looks like. As with all her reports, this time with photographer Eduardo García, she offers a grim but startling vision of where this country may be headed. Tom

A Magical Mystery Tour of American Austerity Politics
One State’s Attempt to Destroy Democracy and the Environment
By Laura Gottesdiener, with photos and reporting by Eduardo García

Something is rotten in the state of Michigan.

One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself -- all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

If you’re thinking, "Who cares?" since what happens in Michigan stays in Michigan, think again. The state’s aggressive balance-the-books style of governance has already spread beyond its borders. In January, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed bankruptcy lawyer and former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr to be a “legal adviser” to Atlantic City. The Detroit Free Press described the move as “a state takeover similar to Gov. Rick Snyder's state intervention in the Motor City.”

And this spring, amid the hullabaloo of Republicans entering the 2016 presidential race, Governor Snyder launched his own national tour to sell “the Michigan story to the rest of the country.” His trip was funded by a nonprofit (fed, naturally, by undisclosed donations) named “Making Government Accountable: The Michigan Story.”

To many Michiganders, this sounded as ridiculous as Jeb Bush launching a super PAC dubbed "Making Iraq Free: The Bush Family Story.” Except Snyder wasn’t planning to enter the presidential rat race. Instead, he was attempting to mainstream Michigan’s form of austerity politics and its signature emergency management legislation, which stripped more than half of the state’s African American residents of their local voting rights in 2013 and 2014.

As the governor jaunted around the country, Ann Arbor-based photographer Eduardo García and I decided to set out on what we thought of as our own two-week Magical Michigan Tour. And while we weren’t driving a specially outfitted psychedelic tour bus -- we spent most of the trip in my grandmother’s 2005 Prius -- our journey was nevertheless remarkably surreal. From the southwest banks of Lake Michigan to the eastern tips of the peninsula, we crisscrossed the state visiting more than half a dozen cities to see if there was another side to the governor’s story and whether Michigan really was, as one Detroit resident put it, “a massive experiment in unraveling U.S. democracy.”

Stop One: Water Wars in Flint

Just as we arrive, the march spills off the sidewalk in front of the city council building.

“Stop poisoning our children!” chants a little girl as the crowd tumbles down South Saginaw Street, the city’s main drag. We’re in Flint, Michigan, a place that hit the headlines last year for its brown, chemical-laced, possibly toxic water. A wispy white-haired woman waves a gallon jug filled with pee-colored liquid from her home tap. “They don’t care that they’re killing us!” she cries.



A Flint resident at the march demanding clean water. Photo credit: Eduardo García

We catch up with Claire McClinton, the formidable if grandmotherly organizer of the Flint Democracy Defense League, as we approach the roiling Flint River. It’s been a longtime dumping ground for the riverfront factories of General Motors and, as of one year ago today, the only source of the city’s drinking water. On April 25, 2014, on the instruction of the city’s emergency manager, Flint stopped buying its supplies from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and started drawing water directly from the river, which meant a budgetary savings of $12 million a year. The downside: people started getting sick.

Since then, tests have detected E. coli and fecal bacteria in the water, as well as high levels of trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic chemical cocktail known as THMs. For months, the city concealed the presence of THMs, which over years can lead to increased rates of cancer, kidney failure, and birth defects. Still, it was obvious to local residents that something was up. Some of them were breaking out in mysterious rashes or experiencing bouts of severe diarrhea, while others watched as their eyelashes and hair began to fall out.

As we cross a small footbridge, McClinton recounts how the city council recently voted to “do all things necessary” to get Detroit’s water back. The emergency manager, however, immediately overrode their decision, terming it “incomprehensible.”

“This is a whole different model of control,” she comments drily and explains that she’s now working with other residents to file an injunction compelling the city to return to the use of Detroit’s water. One problem, though: it has to be filed in Ingham County, home to Lansing, the state capital, rather than in Flint’s Genesee County, because the decision of a state-appointed emergency manager is being challenged. “Under state rule, that’s where you go to redress grievances,” she says. “Just another undermining of our local authority.”

In the meantime, many city residents remain frustrated and confused. A few weeks before the march, the city sent out two notices on the same day, packaged in the same envelope. One, printed in black-and-white, stated bluntly: “Our water system recently violated a drinking water standard.” The second, in flashy color, had this cheery message: “We are pleased to report that City of Flint water is safe and meets U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines... You can be confident that the water provided to you today meets all safety standards.” As one recipient of the notices commented, “I can only surmise that the point was to confuse us all.”

McClinton marches in silence for a few minutes as the crowd doubles back across the bridge and begins the ascent up Saginaw Street. Suddenly, a man jumps onto a life-size statue of a runner at the Riverfront Plaza and begins to cloak him in one of the group’s T-shirts.

“Honey, I don’t want you getting in any trouble!” his wife calls out to him.

He’s struggling to pull a sleeve over one of the cast-iron arms when the droning weeoo-weeooo-weeoo of a police siren blares, causing a brief frenzy until the man’s son realizes he’s mistakenly hit the siren feature on the megaphone he’s carrying.

After a few more tense moments, the crowd surges forward, leaving behind the statue, legs stretched in mid-stride, arms raised triumphantly, and on his chest a new cotton T-shirt with the slogan: “Water You Fighting For?”

Stop Two: The Tri-Cities of Cancer

The next afternoon, we barrel down Interstate 75 into an industrial hellscape of smoke stacks, flare offs, and 18-wheelers, en route to another toxicity and accountability crisis. This one was caused by a massive tar sands refinery and dozens of other industrial polluters in southwest Detroit and neighboring River Rouge and Ecorse, cities which lie along the banks of the Detroit River.

Already with a slight headache from a haze of emissions, we meet photographer and community leader Emma Lockridge and her neighbor Anthony Parker in front of their homes, which sit right in the backyard of that tar sands refinery.

In 2006, the toxicity levels in their neighborhood, known simply by its zip code as “48217,” were 45 times higher than the state average. And that was before Detroit gave $175 million in tax breaks to the billion-dollar Marathon Petroleum Corporation to help it expand its refinery complex to process a surge of high-sulfur tar sands from Alberta, Canada.



The Marathon tar sands refinery in southwest Detroit. Photo credit: Eduardo García

“We’re a donor zip,” explains Lockridge as she settles into the driver’s seat of our car. “We have all the industry and a tax base, but we get nothing back.”

We set off on a whirlwind tour of their neighborhood, where schools have been torn down and parks closed due to the toxicity of the soil, while so many residents have died of cancer that it's hard for their neighbors to keep track. “We used to play on the swings here,” says Lockridge, pointing to a rusted yellow swing set in a fenced-off lot where the soil has tested for high levels of lead, arsenic, and other poisonous chemicals. “Jumping right into the lead.”

As in other regions of Michigan, people have been fleeing 48217 in droves. Here, however, the depopulation results not from deindustrialization, but from toxicity, thanks to an ever-expanding set of factories. These include a wastewater treatment complex, salt mines, asphalt factories, cement plants, a lime and stone foundry, and a handful of steel mills all clustered in the tri-cities region.

As Lockridge and Parker explain, they have demanded that Marathon buy their homes. They have also implored the state to cap emission levels and have filed lawsuits against particularly toxic factories. In response, all they’ve seen are more factories given more breaks, while the residents of 48217 get none. Last spring, for example, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality permitted the AK Steel plant, located close to the neighborhood, to increase its toxic emissions as much as 725 times. The approval, according to the Detroit Free Press, came after “Gov. Rick Snyder’s business-promoting agency worked for months behind the scenes” lobbying the Department of Environmental Quality.

“Look at this cute little tree out of nowhere over here!” Lockridge exclaims, slowing the car in front of a scrawny plant whose branches, in the midst of this industrial wasteland, bend under the weight of white blossoms.

“That tree ain't gonna grow up,” Parker responds. “It’s dead already.”

“It’s trying,” Lockridge insists. “Aww, it’s kind of sad. It’s a Charlie Brown tree.”

The absurdity of life in such an environment is highlighted when we reach a half-mile stretch of sidewalk sandwiched between a massive steel mill and a coal-fired power plant that has been designated a “Wellness Walk.”

“Energize your Life!” implores the sign affixed to a chain-link fence surrounding the power plant. It’s an unlikely site for an exercise walk, given that the state’s health officials consider this strip and the nearby park “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.”

After a sad laugh, we head for Zug Island, a Homeland Security-patrolled area populated by what look to be giant black vacuum cleaners but are actually blast furnaces. The island was named for millionaire Samuel Zug, who built a lavish mansion there only to discover that it was sinking into swampland. It is now home to U.S. Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in the nation.

On our way back, we make a final stop at Oakwood Heights, an almost entirely vacant and partially razed subdivision located on the other side of the Marathon plant. “This is the white area that was bought out,” says Lockridge. The scene is eerie: small residential streets lined by grassy fields and the occasional empty house. That Marathon paid residents to evacuate their homes in this predominantly white section of town, while refusing to do the same in the predominantly African American 48217, which sits closer to the refinery, strikes neither Lockridge and Parker nor their neighbors as a coincidence.

We survey the remnants of the former neighborhood: bundles of ragged newspapers someone was once supposed to deliver, a stuffed teddy bear abandoned on a wooden porch, and a childless triangle-shaped playground whose construction, a sign reads, was “made possible by generous donations from Marathon.”

As this particularly unmagical stop on our Michigan tour comes to an end, Parker says quietly, “I’ve got to get my family out of here.”

Lockridge agrees. “I just wish we had a refuge place we could go to while we’re fighting," she says. "You see we’re surrounded.”

Stop Three: The Great White North

Not all of Michigan’s problems are caused by emergency management, but this sweeping new power does lie at the heart of many local controversies. Later that night we meet with retired Detroit city worker, journalist, and organizer Russ Bellant who has made himself something of an expert on the subject.

In 2011, he explains, Governor Snyder signed an emergency manager law known as Public Act 4. The impact of this law and its predecessor, Public Act 72, was dramatic. In the city of Pontiac, for instance, the number of public employees plummeted from 600 to 50. In Detroit, the emergency manager of the school district waged a six-year slash-and-burn campaign that, in the end, shuttered 95 schools. In Benton Harbor, the manager effectively dissolved the city government, declaring: “The fact of the matter is, the city manager is now gone. I am the city manager. I replace the financial director, so I’m the financial director and the city manager. I am the mayor and the commission. And I don’t need them.”

So in 2012, Bellant cancelled all his commitments in Detroit, packed his car full of chocolate pudding snacks, canned juices, and fliers and headed north to support a statewide campaign to repeal the law through a ballot referendum in that fall’s general election. For two months, he crisscrossed the upper reaches of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the part of the state that people say looks like a hand, as well as the remote Upper Peninsula that borders Wisconsin and Canada.

“Seven or eight hours a day, I would just knock on doors,” he says.

In November, the efforts paid off and voters repealed the act, but the celebration was short-lived. Less than two months later, during a lame-duck session of the state legislature, Governor Snyder pushed through and signed Public Act 436, a broader version of the legislation that was referendum-proof. Since then, financial managers have continued to shut down fire departments, outsource police departments, sell off parking meters and public parks. In Flint, the manager even auctioned off the plastic Santa Claus that once adorned city hall, setting the initial bidding price at $5.

And here’s one fact of life in Michigan: emergency management is normally only imposed on majority-black cities. From 2013 to 2014, 52% of the African American residents in the state lived under emergency management, compared to only 2% of white residents. And yet the repeal vote against the previous version of the act was a demographic landslide: 75 out of 83 counties voted to nix the legislation, including all of Michigan’s northern, overwhelmingly white, rural counties. “I think people just internalized that P.A. 4 was undemocratic,” Bellant says.

That next morning, we travel north to the city of Alpena, a 97% white lakeside town where Bellant knocked on doors and the recall was triumphant. The farther north we head, the more the landscape changes. We pass signs imploring residents to “Take Back America: Liberty Yes, Tyranny No.” Gas stations feature clay figurines of hillbillies drinking moonshine in bathtubs.

It’s almost evening when we arrive. We spend part of our visit at the Dry Dock, a dive bar overseen by a raspy-voiced bartender where all the political and demographic divides of the state -- and, in many ways, the country -- are on full display. Two masons are arguing about their union; the younger one likes the protections it provides, while his colleague ditched the local because he didn’t want to pay the dues. That move became possible only after Snyder signed controversial “right-to-work” legislation in 2012, allowing workers to opt-out of union dues and causing a sharp decline in union membership ever since.

Above their heads, the television screen projects intentionally terrifying images of the uprising in Baltimore in response to the police murder of Freddie Gray, an unarmed African American man. “The Bloods, the Crips, and the Guerrillas are out for the National Guard,” comments a carpenter about the unarmed protesters, a sneer of distain in his voice. “Not that I like the fucking cops, either,” he adds.



The bartender of the Dry Dock plays pool with other regulars. Photo credit: Eduardo García

Throughout our visit, people repeatedly told us that Alpena “isn’t Detroit or Flint” and that they have absolutely no fear of the state seizing control of their sleepy, white, touristy city. When we press the question with the owner of a bicycle shop, the hostility rises in his voice as he explains: “Things just run the way they should here” -- by which he means, of course, that down in Detroit and Flint, residents don’t run things the way they should.

Yet, misconceptions notwithstanding, the county voted to repeal Public Act 4 with a staggering 63% of those who turned out opting to strike down the law.

Reflecting Bellant’s feeling that locals grasped the law’s undemocratic nature in some basic way, even if it would never affect them personally, one resident offered this explanation: “When you think about living in a democracy, then this is like financial martial law... I know they say these cities need help, but it didn’t feel like something that would help.”

Stop Four: The Fugitive Task Force

The next day, as 2,000 soldiers from the 175th Infantry Regiment of the National Guard fanned out across Baltimore, we head for Detroit’s west side where, only 24 hours earlier, a law enforcement officer shot and killed a 20-year-old man in his living room.

A crowd has already gathered near his house in the early summer heat, exchanging condolences, waving signs, and jostling for position as news crews set up cameras and microphones for a press conference to come. Versions of what happened quickly spread: Terrance Kellom was fatally shot when officers swarmed his house to deliver an arrest warrant. The authorities claim that he grabbed a hammer, prompting the shooting; his father, Kevin, contends Terrance was unarmed and kneeling in front of him when he was shot several times, including once in the back.

Kellom is just one of the 489 people killed in 2015 in the United States by law enforcement officers. There is, however, a disturbing twist to Kellom’s case. He was not, in fact, killed by the police but by a federal agent working with a little known multi-jurisdictional interagency task force coordinated by the U.S. Marshals.

Similar task forces are deployed across the country and they all share the same sordid history: the Marshals have been hunting people ever since the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act compelled the agency to capture slaves fleeing north for freedom. One nineteenth-century newspaper account, celebrating the use of bloodhounds in such hunts, wrote: “The Cuban dog would frequently pull down his game and tear the runaway to pieces before the officers could come up.”

These days, Detroit’s task force has grown particularly active as budget cuts have decimated the local police department. Made up of federal Immigration and Customs officers, police from half a dozen local departments, and even employees of the Social Security Administration office, the Detroit Fugitive Apprehension Team has nabbed more than 15,000 people. Arrest rates have soared since 2012, the same year the local police budget was chopped by 20%. Even beyond the task force, the number of federal agents patrolling the city has risen as well. The Border Patrol, for example, has increased its presence in the region by tenfold over the last decade and just two weeks ago announced the launch of a new $14 million Detroit station.

Kevin Kellom approaches the barricade of microphones and begins speaking so quietly that the gathered newscasters crush into each other in an effort to catch what’s he’s saying. “They assassinated my son,” he whispers. “I want justice and I’m going to get justice.”

Yet today, six weeks after Terrance’s death, no charges have been brought against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fired the fatal shot. Other law enforcement officers who have killed Michigan residents in recent years have similarly escaped punishment. Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley was videotaped killing seven-year-old Aiyana Jones with a submachine gun during a SWAT team raid on her home in 2010. He remains a member of the department. Ann Arbor police officer David Reid is also back on duty after fatally shooting 40-year-old artist and mother Aura Rosser in November 2014. The Ann Arbor police department ruled that a “justifiable homicide” because Rosser was holding a small kitchen knife during the encounter -- a ruling that Rosser’s family members and city residents are contesting with an ongoing campaign calling for an independent investigation into her death.


Residents march during a #BlackLivesMatter protest on May 1, 2015, in Ann Arbor to call for an independent investigation into Aura Rosser’s death. Photo credit: Eduardo García

And such deadly incidents continue. Since Kellom’s death, law enforcement officers have fatally shot at least three more Michigan residents -- one outside the city of Kalamazoo, another near Lansing, and a third in Battle Creek.

Stop Five: The Unprofitable All-Charter School District

Our final stop is Muskegon Heights, a small city on the banks of Lake Michigan, home to perhaps the most spectacular educational debacle in recent history. Here’s the SparkNotes version. In 2012, members of the Muskegon Heights public school board were given two options: dissolve the district entirely or succumb to an emergency manager’s rule. On arrival, the manager announced that he was dissolving the public school district and forming a new system to be run by the New York-based for-profit charter school management company Mosaica Education. Two years later, that company broke its five-year contract and fled because, according to the emergency manager, “the profit just simply wasn't there.”

And here’s a grim footnote to this saga: in 2012, in preparation for the new charter school district, cryptically named the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy System, the emergency manager laid off every single school employee.

“We knew it was coming,” explained one of the city’s longtime elementary school teachers. She asked not to be identified, so I'll call her Susan. “We received letters in the mail.”

Then, around one a.m. the night before the new charter school district was slated to open, she received a voicemail asking if she could teach the following morning. She agreed, arriving at Martin Luther King Elementary School for what would be the worst year in her more than two-decade career.

When we visit that school, a single-story brick building on the east side of town, the glass of the front door had been smashed and the halls were empty, save for two people removing air conditioning units. But in the fall of 2012, when Susan was summoned, Martin Luther King was still filled with students -- and chaos. Schedules were in disarray. Student computers were broken. There were supply shortages of just about everything, even rolls of toilet paper. The district’s already barebones special education program had been further gutted. The “new,” non-unionized teaching staff -- about 10% of whom initially did not have valid teaching certificates -- were overwhelmingly young, inexperienced, and white. (Approximately 75% of the town’s residents are African American.)

“Everything was about money, I felt, and everyone else felt it, too,” Susan says.



The smashed glass of the front entrance of Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, which closed after students fled the charter school district. Photo credit: Eduardo García

With her salary slashed to less than $30,000, she picked up a second job at a nearby after-school program. Her health faltered. Instructed by the new administration never to sit down during class, a back condition worsened until surgery was required. The stress began to affect her short-term memory. Finally, in the spring, Susan sought medical leave and never came back.

She was part of a mass exodus. Advocates say that more than half the teachers were either fired, quit, or took medical leave before the 2012-2013 school year ended. Mosaica itself wasn’t far behind, breaking its contract at the end of the 2014 school year. The emergency manager said he understood the company's financial assessment, comparing the school system to "a broke-down car." That spring, Governor Snyder visited and called the district “a work in progress.”

Across the state, the education trend has been toward privatization and increased control over local districts by the governor’s office, with results that are, to say the least, underwhelming. This spring, a report from The Education Trust, an independent national education nonprofit, warned that the state’s system had gone “from bad to worse.”

"We're now on track to perform lower than the nation's lowest-performing states," the report’s author, Amber Arellano, told the local news.

Later that afternoon, we visited the city’s James Jackson Museum of African American History, where we sat with Dr. James Jackson, a family physician and longtime advocate of community-controlled public education in the city.

He explains that the city's now-failing struggle for local control and quality education is part of a significantly longer history. Most of the town’s families originally arrived here in the first half of the twentieth century from the Jim Crow South, where public schools for Black students were not only abysmally underfunded, but also thwarted by censorship and outside governance, as historian Carter Goodwin Woodson explained in his groundbreaking 1933 study, The Mis-Education of the Negro. Well into the twentieth century, for example, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were barred from grade-school textbooks for being too aspirational. “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson wrote back then.

More than eight decades later, Dr. Jackson offered similar thoughts about the Muskegon Heights takeover as he led us through the museum, his bright yellow T-shirt reminding us to “Honor Black History Every Day 24/7 -- 365.”

“We have to control our own education,” Jackson said, as we passed sepia newspaper clippings of civil rights marches and an 1825 bill of sale for Peggy and her son Jonathan, purchased for $371 by James Aiken of Warren County, Georgia. “Until we control our own school system, we can’t be properly educated.”

As we leave, we stop a moment to take in an electronic sign hanging in the museum’s window that, between announcements about upcoming book club meetings and the establishment’s hours, flashed this refrain in red letters:

The education of
Muskegon Heights
Belongs to the People
Not the governor

The following day, we finally arrived back in Detroit, our notebooks and iPhone audio records and camera memory cards filled to the brim, heads spinning from everything we had seen, our aging Prius-turned-tour-bus in serious need of an oil change.

While we had been bumping along on our Magical Michigan Tour, the national landscape had, in some ways, grown even more surreal. Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist senator from Vermont, announced that he was challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket. Detroit neuroscientist Dr. Ben Carson -- famous for declaring that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” -- entered the Republican circus. And amid the turmoil, Governor Snyder’s style continued to attract attention, including from the editors of Bloomberg View, who touted his experience with “urban revitalization,” concluding: “His brand of politics deserves a wider audience.”

So buckle your seat belts and watch out. In some “revitalized” Bloombergian future, you, too, could flee your school district like the students and teachers of Muskegon Heights, or drink contaminated water under the mandate of a state-appointed manager like the residents of Flint, or be guaranteed toxic fumes to breathe like the neighbors of 48217, or get shot like Terrance Kellom by federal agents in your own living room. All you have to do is let Rick Snyder’s yellow submarine cruise into your neighborhood.

Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and the author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Al Jazeera, Guernica, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and frequently at TomDispatch.

Eduardo García is an Ann Arbor-based photographer and researcher focused on indigenous peoples in México, Mexican and Central American migration, disappearances, and social movements in Latin America.