300 | Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages

Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation

Dianne Feeley1

The media are full of good news stories about the “rebirth of Detroit.”
The reality – viewed from the ground of struggle against foreclosures,
evictions and water shutoffs – is the story in which life remains
precarious for the majority of its citizens, 82 percent of whom are African
American. As the 2008 crisis gathered storm, an economic tornado tore
through Black Detroit. That year the number of employed Detroiters fell
by 26 percent and, in a city with a high proportion of African-American
homeowners, foreclosures mounted. Seven years later one out of three
homes lies abandoned. Still, 10,000 occupied homes were slated for sale in
the fall 2015 tax foreclosure auctions. Like the bankruptcy Detroit was
forced to undergo, the foreclosure process is the result of decisions made
by financial and governmental institutions.

The city’s debt mounted with the one-two punch of the economic
crisis and high fees and interest rates on loans that Wall Street sold to city
officials. Financial advisors worked with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (2002-
08) to “save” the city millions by using variable interest swaps instead of
fixed rates. Claiming the transaction could prevent layoffs and keep the
city pensions nearly 100 percent funded, the Mayor badgered the City
Council into supporting a complex $1.44 billion deal. Wall Street feted the
Mayor – since convicted on federal corruption and fraud charges – and
presented him with the Bond Buyer’s Midwest Deal of the Year Award in
2005. Three years later the stock market collapsed and Detroit’s credit
rating was downgraded. To avoid a $400 million penalty, the city pledged
casino tax revenue as collateral. With principal, interest and insurance
payments, the original loan was projected to double over the next two
decades.

The response of city officials was to lower operating expenses by
almost 40 percent, reducing wages and healthcare benefits and laying off
2,350 workers. While city revenue declined 20 percent, annual debt
service payments rose. By 2009 annual debt repayment stood at $330
million, and a year later would rise to $597 million. As the city ran out of
cash, Mayor Dave Bing (2009-13) was forced to turn to the Michigan State

1 Dianne Feeley is a retired autoworker active in Autoworker Caravan, a rank-and-
file organization, and Detroit Eviction Defense. She lives in Southwest Detroit,
where residents battle against high levels of air pollution, and is an editor of
Against the Current.



Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation | 301

Finance Authority, which arranged a $129.5 million bond underwritten by
Bank of America. The fee was $1.6 million – the best available offer. By
2012 residents were told that the city’s $11-12 billion debt was
unsustainable, but after Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s Financial
Review Board investigated, the figure cited was $18 billion.

Snyder appointed bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn Orr (from the Jones-
Day firm) Emergency Manager in 2013 and gave him full power over city
finances. Within weeks Orr started bankruptcy proceedings. Despite the
fact that the Michigan Constitution states that for government workers
pension benefits “shall not be diminished or impaired,” that guarantee
was negated in federal bankruptcy court. City workers and retirees were
savaged by the bankruptcy. Forced to vote for a reduction of their pensions
and health care or promised an even worse “deal,” a majority of the 32,000
retirees and workers agreed. Since police and firefighters do not receive
social security benefits, their pensions took less of a hit than the majority,
who accepted a 4.5 percent cut and lost cost-of-living increases.

Instead of health care benefits, retirees receive somewhere between
a $125-400 check each month. Amru Meah, retired director of the
Building Safety and Engineering Department and a cancer patient in
remission, remarked to the Michigan Citizen, “God forbid I should have
another operation – I’ve already had two.” His monthly healthcare cost
rose from $280 a month to $1200, with a $2800 yearly deductible for him
and his wife. Reduction in health care coverage alone wiped out $4 billion
of the city’s debt. An investigative reporter for the ACLU, Curt Guyette
calculated that of the $7 billion trimmed through bankruptcy, 80 percent
came from the city workers and retirees.

AUSTERITY PREPARES THE GROUND FOR

GENTRIFICATION

Gentrification is touted as the way urban centers whose industrial
base has collapsed can reinvent themselves. Yet in a city that covers 140
square miles, new investment continues to be concentrated downtown,
sweeping away African-American-owned businesses and displacing low-
income senior citizens. Since 2006, $6 billion has been invested in real
estate development in greater downtown; between 2010 and 2012 more
than $2 billion was invested in 130 downtown projects. Detroit, however, is
a city of neighborhoods, so gentrification has been accomplished by
starving communities where the vast majority of Detroiters live. Most
people don’t live in a city for its downtown sports arenas, but rather for
good schools, strong, safe neighborhoods and access to jobs. From that
vantage point, Detroit is a disaster. Block after block is littered with



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foreclosed homes and vacant stores; more than 100 schools have been
closed. In a city where once many walked to factories in their area, or took
a trolley across town, those plants are now shuttered.

Meanwhile downtown has Comerica Park, where the Tigers play;
Ford Stadium, home of the Lions; and an expanded (though no longer city-
owned) Cobo Hall, where the International Auto Show kicks off at the
beginning of each year. The planned Hockeytown, brain child of Mike
Ilitch, will be not only the new home for his Red Wings team, but a
residential and entertainment complex. While the city donated some of
the land, the state arranged a $650 million 30-year bond that will be paid
through a private-public partnership. The Ilitch organization’s share is
estimated to be $367 million; the city will receive little in taxes or even
parking fees. Mayor Mike Duggan – Detroit’s first white mayor in 30 years
– subsequently announced that Brush Park, an 8.4 acre parcel of land just
across from the Hockeytown site, has been turned over to Dan Gilbert of
Quicken Loans. Never mind that of the more than 1,000 Detroit
mortgages Quicken Loans wrote between 2005 and 2014, the majority
ended in foreclosure. In fact the U.S. Justice Department is currently
suing the company for falsifying the worth of its FHA-insured loans. Yet it
is Gilbert’s construction company that will be building over 330
townhouses and apartments in historic Brush Park.

Formerly derelict downtown buildings have been transformed into
elegant hotels, apartments, offices and restaurants. Previously some had
been abandoned while others had become housing where low-income
seniors paid with a federally funded voucher providing 75 percent of the
rent (Section 8 Housing). This was the story of The Griswold, designed by
Detroit’s most famous architect Albert Kahn, built in 1929. The new
owners gave the 100+ residents, several with disabilities, a year’s notice to
vacate. Initially the company said they would preserve 10-20 units of low-
income housing, but when federal and state agencies declined to negotiate
a higher voucher rate, all were given notice. The building received an $8
million upgrade. Today the renamed building, The Albert, has 127 luxury
apartments with such amenities as an exercise room, dog walking services
and a 24-hour concierge.

Perhaps to lure middle-class residents and new businesses, city
officials have prioritized building a 3.3 mile track for the M-1, a fast train
running up Woodward, the only area of the city already adequately
serviced by buses. Each mile of construction will cost $42 million. The M-1
Rail is a public-private partnership and Dan Gilbert, touted as Detroit’s
savior, has purchased the naming rights. Such partnerships bundle
business and foundation monies to attract federal, state and local



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subsidies and grants to drive their projects. Presenting themselves as the
city’s business and philanthropic leaders, these partnerships soak up
public money for projects residents have not prioritized, and marketize
what would once have been considered a public good. Detroit uses public-
private partnerships to establish amenities for the new downtown. These
are an essential element to gentrification because city services, according
the Mayor, are limited to police, fire, street lights and garbage pickup.

The Detroit Police Department represents a lingering sore. In 2003
it signed two consent agreements with the Justice Department, agreeing
to independent monitoring for use of excessive force, illegal arrests and
unconstitutional conditions of imprisonment. Originally the agreement
was to last for five years, but failure to meet goals extended that
monitoring system until 2016. Police misconduct, however, has not been
eradicated. Between 2008-14 more than 300 people were awarded a total
of $27 million in damages.

HOW DETROIT BECAME POOR AND BLACK

While African Americans had been part of Detroit since before the
Civil War – and in fact had built a strong Black Abolitionist Movement –
beginning in 1910 the population increased as Blacks streamed out of the
Jim Crow South in search of opportunities in northern cities. In Detroit
they also found the Ku Klux Klan and Black Legion: a Klan sympathizer
served briefly as mayor in the late 1920s and the police force was riddled
with Klan members.

Housing and steady work were hard to come by, but Henry Ford
viewed Black men as hard workers. The company used the Black church
as a hiring hall and as a means of securing loyalty to Ford. At one point 25
percent of all African-American men living in Detroit worked at Ford’s
Rouge plant. When a workman fell asleep on the trolley going home,
people identified him as a “Ford” man. While Black organizers played a
crucial role in organizing the union at Ford, the racial divide in housing,
employment and social life continued. Hate strikes by white workers broke
out in a number of plants during World War II as more Black workers –
including Black women – were hired or promoted. A 1943 race riot lasted
three days and left 34 dead, mostly African Americans. Although the UAW
leadership opposed the violence and used its authority to end the hate
strikes, it was timid in defending Black workers’ advancement on the job
and failed to promote Black leadership.

As capital expanded in the postwar period, the racial divide widened.
Auto companies built 33 new plants in Metro Detroit between 1945 and
1960 – but not one in the city. The biggest of the city’s plants, including



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Dodge Main and the Clark Street Cadillac plant, shut down just as
African Americans had gained a strong foothold in the industry.

New highways, constructed with federal money under President
Dwight Eisenhower’s administration – combined with federal housing
policies that red-lined neighborhoods and enforced segregation – lured the
better-off sector of the working class to nearby suburbs. Over six decades
total Detroit property values shrank from $37 billion to $9.4 billion (in
2012 dollars.) This history is the background to understanding today’s
Detroit. In 1950 there were almost 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the city;
now there are 25,000. As industry began to leave and much of the white
working class (and some African Americans) followed, unemployment and
poverty grew.

As early as 1963 there weren’t enough white students in the Detroit
public schools to desegregate them. In the early 1970s a federal judge
ordered busing across city boundaries but the Michigan Supreme Court
struck the busing plan down, concluding that since the suburbs didn’t
cause the city’s problems, they didn’t have to be part of the solution. This
court decision articulated the reasoning that easily dismissed the racial
and economic divide as it continued to deepen. In 1999 the state took over
the city schools. Programs to “restructure” education – allowing charter
schools, constructing a state-run system for the supposedly “worst”
schools and appointing an Emergency Manager over the public schools –
have resulted in the loss of 100,000 students to the Detroit public schools,
cuts to teacher salaries and benefits, and the closure of more than 100
schools. By 2016 the school debt will balloon to $515 million. Deep
inequality and poverty produces alarming statistics. Detroit’s maternal
death rate stands at 58.7 per 100,000 babies, higher than in Libya,
Uruguay or Vietnam. While the murder rate has declined, Detroit, with a
population of 680,000, has as many murders as New York City.

No other U.S. city has such concentrated poverty. Sixty percent of
Detroit’s children live in poverty – an increase of 34 percent since 2004 –
and children die at a higher rate than any other U.S. city, victimized by
poverty, lack of access to health care and violence. While one-third suffers
from asthma, at least 35 percent of the total student population has lead
poisoning. In a city where there is almost one murder a day, most young
people have friends they have seen buried.

FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS

This entire history was buried under the rug as the city approached
bankruptcy. Kevyn Orr infamously explained his perspective in a Wall
Street Journal interview: “For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy



Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation | 305

and rich.” It was that wealth that made people believe “if you had an
eighth-grade education, you’ll get 30 years of a good job and a pension and
great health care, but you don’t have to worry about what’s going to come.”
(Battaglia, 2013). What Orr did not say was that Michigan had actually
been reducing Detroit’s portion of state revenue sharing since 2003.
Athough state sales tax collection went from $6.6 billion a year to $7.72
billion over the decade, revenue sharing to cities and towns declined from
an annual $900 million to $250 million. Over that decade Detroit was
cheated out of $732 million. (Minghine, 2014)

Was the bankruptcy necessary? Not according to Wallace C.
Turbeville’s (2013) report. Rather than the assertion that the city had a
crushing debt, he concluded that Detroit suffered from a $198 million
annual cash flow deficit. The Demos Senior Fellow pinpointed three
immediate sources that could cut that in half: $43 million from state
revenue sharing, $30-45 million in uncollected taxes from reverse
commuters, and saving $20 million by not providing tax incentives to
corporations. Two of those could have been solved by the state, and one by
city officials. (Turbeville, 2013)

THE WATER SHUTOFFS

As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, the Emergency Manager
demanded that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD)
shut off service to delinquent accounts. In the spring of 2014 the
department targeted more than 15,000 homes with bills exceeding $150.
Many did not receive notice or a chance to dispute the bill. (In this writer’s
own four-unit building, water has been shut off more than once due to
administrative billing mixups.) Nearly 10 years ago Michigan Welfare
Rights Organization spearheaded a water affordability plan (designed by
Roger Colton) for income-eligible residents. This plan was in line with
both Environmental Protection Agency recommendations that households
pay 2-3 percent of their income for water/sewerage service and UN
documents that recognize “the right to safe and clean drinking water and
sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life
and all human rights.”

The City Council passed the plan but the DWSD never implemented
it. Over time the federal government has reduced its share of funding
infrastructural improvements so water department officials responded by
borrowing more money and raising residential rates – by 120 percent over
the last decade. Having made a series of disastrous interest rate swaps,
DWSD officials then borrowed more than $530 million to buy their way
out of the deals. By the time of the bankruptcy, DWSD was making



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annual debt payments of $420 million, which amounted to more than it
spent on its operating costs ($380.6 million). As a result, residents were
receiving water bills for as much as 20 percent of their income.

In response to the shutoffs the People’s Water Board, a coalition of
two dozen organizations, set up water stations in community centers and
churches. Delegations from indigenous communities, from Canada and
from the rural South caravanned to the city, bringing containers of water.
Groups blockaded trucks to be dispatched for water shutoffs and were
arrested. The Emergency Manager hastily turned the problem over to the
Mayor, who briefly suspended the shutoffs in order to set up a payment
plan option for the poorest. He got various businesses and foundations to
contribute funding, but by the summer of 2015 it run dry.

As news of the shutoffs went viral, the People’s Water Board asked
the United Nations to intervene. Two UN Special Rapporteurs visited the
city in October 2014, holding an informational meeting attended by
several hundred, toured the city and met with water department and city
officials. The report they wrote contained recommendations that were
promptly ignored by the Mayor, who proclaimed that there is no such
thing as “free” water. (ACLU, 2015). Working with block clubs that cover
20 percent of the city, Detroit Eviction Defense and the organizations that
make up the People’s Water Board canvassed neighborhoods and
confronted the Mayor at public meetings. Officials have been forced to
adjust their policies, but foreclosures and water shutoffs continue.

WHO CAN ACCESS JOBS?

In 2015 Detroit’s official unemployment rate stood at 10 percent,
twice the state’s average, but more importantly about 175,000 working-
age Detroiters no longer look for work, or never started. A map of Metro
Detroit pinpointing where the jobs are starkly reveals the problems
Detroiters face. Seventy-seven percent of Metro Detroit jobs are at least 10
miles from the city’s central business district. Given that one quarter of
Detroiters lack cars, the inadequate bus service adds hours to the daily
commute. Witness the human interest story about James Robertson.
Robertson rode buses and walked 23 miles each way to get to his $10.55 an
hour job as an injection molder. Many opened their hearts and wallets so
that this African-American man in his 50s now has a car and secure
housing. Yet there are at least 10,000 other Detroiters in the same
circumstances.

The reality is that only 28 percent of city residents are employed
within the city; of those working in the suburbs, 42 percent earn less than
$15,000 annually. The “Fight for 15” campaign is one attempt to overcome



Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation | 307

the individual problems low-wage and usually non-unionized Detroiters
face. Spearheaded by SEIU and supported by Southeast Michigan Jobs for
Justice and the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Detroit
campaign has targeted 50 Metro Detroit companies whose 50,000 workers
earn $7.40 an hour. Doubling their wages would definitely increase the
quality of their lives and dramatically impact other low-wage workers.

While the Metro area remains an auto manufacturing center, three-
quarters of the jobs are in the lower-paying and generally non-union auto
parts sector. Even at the Big Three assembly plants, workers hired after
2007 make $10 an hour less than what the company calls “traditional”
workers. They also have an inferior health care plan and no pension
benefits. This two-tier system breaks the lines of solidarity between
workers. The newly negotiated Big Three/UAW contracts do manage to
bring the second-tier workers’ wages up to the standard, although only
over an eight-year period. However, the contracts also carved out
exceptions and extended the use of temporaries, who are locked into a
permanently lower wage, few benefits and little job security. Multitier
wages and benefits are the new normal, locking in inequality.

FORECLOSURES CONTINUE, BLIGHT SPREADS

Probably 10,000 occupied homes – around 25,000 people – faced tax
foreclosure in 2015. Their homes were auctioned off in September and
October, just before winter hit. You might wonder why the city and county
pursue foreclosure when 42 percent of Detroit residents are poor; many
living in homes inherited from relatives, or bought in better days.
Detroiters actually have the highest residential property taxes in the
country, and if we fail to pay, an annual 18 percent interest is tacked on.
Until recently unpaid water bills – now averaging $75 a month – were
added on. As a result, property taxes on a foreclosed home are often more
than its market value. In 2014 the online tax auction recovered $107
million of the $691 million that was supposedly owned. In short, for a 15
percent recovery rate the city suffered another round of abandoned homes
that are quickly stripped by scalpers and often burnt, creating more
blight.

Detroit Eviction Defense and many other organizations demand a
stop to tax foreclosures. Even Mayor Mike Duggan admitted current tax
assessments are not linked to the market value of homes, but announced
it would take several years before reassessments are completed.
Meanwhile he claims his hands are tied. Somehow it’s okay to move
quickly through bankruptcy, but be slow as molasses in responding to
continuing foreclosures. This is the policy whereby African-American



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working-class homeowners are being displaced. But this “irrationality” in
the face of a disaster does have the effect of clearing out large sections of
the city. Developers will have a unique opportunity to redesign a major
U.S. city. Foundations have already mapped out what “Detroit Future
City” might look like, with trees and ponds where African-American
homes once sheltered generations.

“Blight removal,” reminiscent of the “urban removal” schemes that
destroyed the Black communities of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom in
the 1940s and ‘50s, is reducing African-American homeownership. Given
that homes represent 53 percent of the African-American families’ total
wealth, that drop in ownership will only increase the already widening
wealth gap between Black and white families. David Harvey has
summarized this process by noting: “Capitalism has periodically to break
out of the constraints imposed by the world it has constructed. It is in
mortal danger of becoming sclerotic. The building of a geographical
landscape favourable to capital accumulation in one era becomes…a fetter
upon accumulation in the next. Capital has, therefore, to devalue much of
the fixed capital in the existing geographical landscape in order to build a
wholly new landscape in a different image. This sparks intense and
destructive localised crises. The most obvious contemporary example of
such devaluation in the USA is Detroit.” (Harvey, 2014, 155).

POSSIBILITIES, HOPE AND STRUGGLE

A city is an exciting place to live because of the history and culture
residents have created. Detroit has been a center of not only industry, but
of distinct neighborhoods. It has forged a wide-ranging cultural
production from the symphony to the blues, jazz, Motown, gospel, hip hop,
and techno music to poetry, dance, painting and sculpture. We are home to
Diego Rivera’s industrial murals, the Cass Corridor art of the 1960s and
‘70s, and the found art installations of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project
and street murals. As an activist involved in fighting aspects of
gentrification and environmental injustice over the years, and as an active
member of Detroit Eviction Defense, I am both proud of our victories and
aware of how far we are from what we need.

Like a number of organizations and coalitions, Detroit Eviction
Defense focuses on a particular issue. In our case it is stopping
foreclosures. In listening to people’s stories, we encourage them to stay in
their homes and advise them of what few resources there are. We
accompany them to court – and the presence of a dozen or so people
standing up when the case is called puts the judge and attorneys on notice
that we have this person’s back. A number of phone calls and of emails,



Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation | 309

marches through the neighborhood and strategic demonstrations can
make a difference.

Although it is intensive to carry out a 10-hour day, five-days a week
watch over a foreclosed home, through the help of neighbors and our
committee’s alert system we have stopped eviction orders from being
carried out long enough to enable a settlement to be forged. We are
fortunate in having several UAW locals work with us, but while they
contribute important resources and sometimes their physical presence,
most union members are not involved in our ongoing organizational work.
A more organic unity would strengthen the work, although brutal
Alternative Work Schedules and mandatory overtime make that difficult.

Certainly if we compare the 1930s factory sit-downs and how they
spread like wildfire, or compare ourselves to the mass UAW marches that
filled Cadillac Square during the 1950s and ‘60s, our organizations are a
shadow of that working class. Clearly the forces that impacted Detroit
were shaped by business decisions and governmental policies, but
organized labor’s willingness to accept deep concessions especially from
the early 1980s is also a factor.

Concessions were sold to the membership on the promise to regain
what we lost as the economy picked up. The UAW leadership, having
consolidated its power, was threatened by the idea of discussing the
economic downturn with its membership. So as the auto industry
restructured, that narrow vision undermined the solidaristic culture key
to the industrial organizing that made Detroit a union town. Breaking
those bonds reinforced the capitalist culture of “taking care of one’s own”
and its embedded racism. It’s musical chairs writ large.

Today, of every two African-American families living in the city, one
is living in poverty. Given both the history of racism and the failure of
UAW, the city’s main working-class institution, to chart a solidaristic
response, politicians demonize Detroit. Detroiters feel very much alone –
and the anger that blames Detroiters for the mounting city debt seems
very similar to how European powers speak of the Greeks and their debt.
The key to Detroit’s revival is not the gentrification mania and fist of
austerity, but meeting the needs of the working class. While that could be
more easily possible by pooling the resources of the Metro area, given the
reality of racism that isn’t an available solution now. Yet Detroit is alive
with organizations and projects that honeycomb the city. At the base,
block clubs depend on the initiative of residents to come together, decide
priorities, take action and reach out to other residents.

In those few areas of the city where a large project is projected, the
demand for community benefits is being raised. If such an ordinance were



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adopted by the Detroit City Council, projects of more than $3 million
would need to set aside a certain number of jobs, apprenticeships and
training for local residents as well as having provisions for environmental
protection, sustainable practices, minimal displacement and first
preference to local business for service and supplier contracts. But even
this modest demand for jobs and other community benefits is under
attack. The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation claims such an
ordinance would undermine economic progress. For its part the state
legislature is attempting to cut off the discussion, with the House having
fast tracked a bill that forbids ordinances that would dare to require
higher than minimum wages or apprenticeships.

In reality, the problems of Detroit are similar to those faced by other
cities like Cleveland, Buffalo or East St. Louis. Without successfully
challenging austerity budgets, the growth of low-wage and temporary
work, funneling resources to corporations, continued environmental
pollution and increased military spending, the will to end poverty and
develop sustainable jobs can’t take root. A multi-dimensional organization
with a grassroots, democratic culture, some institutional framework with
resources and an alternative perspective doesn’t exist. What does exist is
a wealth of organizations and larger NGOs that carry out small projects
and job training that indicate what could be done if resources were
available.

Two models that suggest themselves at the city level, although
clearly those by themselves can only provide an outline of an alternative.
While not explicitly anti-capitalist, these models attempt to unite
grassroots democratic decision-making to an institutional structure. The
first was developed in Puerto Alegre, Brazil when a radical section of the
Workers Party won the majority of the city council. A committee of several
thousand residents reviewed and recommended which programs were to
be prioritized and funded. Known as the “participatory budget” process, it
was handicapped by an inadequate budget. Nonetheless resources were
funneled to lower-income communities, resulting in improving community
education and health services and reducing corruption. This democratic
and transparent process goes far beyond a community benefit ordinance –
as important a step as that would be for Detroit. Another aspect to such a
budget would be considering projects to take the place of the auto
industry, such as building trains and busses for much needed national and
local mass transit systems.

The second example is that of Richmond, California, a formerly
industrial city of little more than 100,000 and home of Chevron’s most
productive refinery. Over the last decade, the Richmond Progressive



Detroit: Realities of Destructive Accumulation | 311

Alliance has emerged as an organization whose candidates have been
elected to the city council on a platform to reduce environmental pollution,
stop police violence and develop a transparent and accountable city
government. Currently of Richmond’s seven councilors, three are
members of RPA. Allied to community organizations willing to challenge
Chevron’s attempts to make Richmond a company town, the councilors
have been able to champion legislation that meets the needs of its diverse
population – 40 percent Latino, 30 percent Black, 14 percent Asian and
fewer than 20 percent white.

In both of these actual models, structures have been created to carry
out the needs of the majority, not the corporate elite. Working only on the
local level, clearly there are limits to what can be accomplished at that
scale. Nonetheless, if Detroit residents, through a commission structure
similar to Puerto Alegre, had been able to audit Detroit’s finances year
after year, chances are that Wall Street would not have suckered the city
into swaps. Further, a broad group of residents would understand how the
city budget is put together rather than the opaque view that exists today.
That would give us a fighting chance to develop an alternative budget –
for example, to help the community urban garden movement flourish
rather than encourage big box stores and large-scale, for-profit
agricultural projects. We need a better, community-driven model, and one
that brings union strength into the center of community organizing.

REFERENCES

ACLU. (2015, August 5). Drops in the Bucket. Youtube.Com,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywzicIRVYoc

Battaglia, Tammy Stables. (2013, August 15). Orr apologizes for 'dumb,
lazy' Detroit comments. USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/15/orr-
apologizes-for-dumb-lazy-detroit-comments/2658515

Harvey, David. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of
Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Minghine, Anthony. (2104). The Great Revenue Sharing Heist. Michigan
Municipal League, http://www.mml.org/advocacy/great-revenue-
sharing-heist.html



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Turbeville, Walter C. (2013). The Detroit Bankruptcy. Demos,
http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Detroit_Bankr
uptcy-Demos.pdf