TS: As most People probably know, Detroit filed the largest Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy action in US history in July 2013. Or, rather, Jones Day, the giant corporate law firm and employer of Kevyn Orr, the "emergency manager" appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, filed that action in Detroit's name. The case has predictably developed into a major class conflict between Detroit city retirees and residents on the one hand, and Wall Street banksters on the other, fighting for their respective interests. The governance and access to billions of dollars in revenue flowing through the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) has become, as knowledgeable observers always knew it would, a major political football and economic prize in this struggle. This month, DWSD commenced an unprecedented mass water shutoff program targeting 1,500-3,000 households per week, up to over 150,000 accounts more than two months and $150 in arrears. Meanwhile, more than $30 million in commercial and industrial accounts goes uncollected. The objective is to eliminate bad debt and make DWSD look better on paper for purposes of active ongoing regionalization and privatization negotiations. A triumph of corporate property interests over fundamental human rights.

JB: What's going to happen to all those residents without water, Tom? It sounds very Third World.

TS: They're scrambling for water from family, neighbors, friends, whatever; trying to find new housing with water included, trying to keep the child welfare system from taking away their kids, trying to find a place to shower and use the toilet. I doubt that those of us who have never faced this particular kind of oppression can imagine what it must be like. Very neocolonial and unjust.

JB: You're not the only one who finds fault with this action. The UN has weighed in. Tell us about that, please.

TS: Yes, three human rights experts opined on behalf of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights that shutting off water for those unable to pay would be a violation of the human right to water. And this morning [June 28, 2014], to many folks' surprise, the Detroit Free Press newspaper - which has generally been very protective and supportive of the emergency manager, published a pretty scathing editorial.

In the many conversations and online exchanges I've had over the last month, it's often seemed like the current leadership of DWSD are the only ones who just don't 'get it,' albeit well-disciplined corporate journalists might quibble about whether it's a human right or a contract or whatever, even they are open to the idea that this is horrible policy, as reflected in the Free Press editorial today. I mean it's not brain surgery; how many cities would you expect to have corporate contractors fanning out in neighborhoods cutting off water to thousands of people per week? Then, their spokesman had the nerve to describe this as 'working more aggressively with our customers,' like 'aggressive interrogation' or something - puts a whole different light on the "waterboard," if you know what I mean!

JB: You've given this a lot of thought. You're on the ground there. What's a better way to skin this cat?

TS: It's not rocket science. Many years ago, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Two-Oh-Oughts, Michigan Welfare Rights - one of the complainants this month to the UN decrying this mass shut-off policy as a violation of human rights - began to see large numbers of water shut-offs, many tens of thousands per year. They hired an expert consultant in utility affordability and equitable access, a man named Roger Colton out of Boston. Dr. Colton developed a detailed "Water Affordability Plan" that led to years of struggle with City Council and DWSD under Kwame Kilpatrick and his fellow felon ex-DWSD Director Victor Mercado. They eventually implemented something called the Detroit Residential Water Affordability Plan (DRWAP).

Colton's original proposal was a real visionary, sustainable rate structure based on ability to pay - like the UN standard that no one should have to pay more than 3% of our household income for water. Of course, knowing Kilpatrick and Mercado, their actual DRWAP program was a much more limited, bureaucratic band-aid kind of thing, where money available from interest on late fees and voluntary contributions for poor relief was pooled and made available to help folks who fell behind on their payments into shut-off status. Not as much of a progressive, sustainable structural solution, but at least some resources to avoid the kind of fiasco we have now. And remember, none of this is bottom-line necessary for survival of DWSD as a utility - they simply want to end all obligations to the public interest, to the most vulnerable among us, and sweeten the pot for the corporate takeover they're arranging behind closed doors now. It comes down to a pretty simple question: What's more important: Human rights, social justice and protecting the Great Lakes with a sustainably funded water and sewer system at their geographic heart? Or setting themselves up with a Wall Street-model smash-and-grab privatization operation to make a quick economic killing for some fast operators? They're opting for the latter, and the hell with the people of Detroit who are in their way.

JB: How do we know that they're planning on privatizing? I'm not saying you're wrong but what proof do you have?

TS: Good question. I don't "know" with certainty exactly what the future holds. I do know several things: that DWSD has been privatizing gradually for decades under Federal Court supervision; using major corporations like Infrastructure Management Group (IMG) and EMA Inc. to take over more and more of their core operation all the time; that the emergency manager put out bids to privatize, which have been filed in secret; and that the powerful suburban county executives who will take over this incredibly important and lucrative system have said they favor privatization and don't want the burden of running it in their low-tax jurisdictions Whatever the specific form of privatization - and there are many, many models being implemented, especially emergency management government, which under Jones Day is a privatization of City Hall itself - you put it together and it looks to me very probably like a public private partnership (P3). The elected and appointed officials making policy decisions in Michigan today are dyed-in-the-wool privatizers, ideological acolytes of the Koch Brothers, ALEC, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the whole nationwide network of extremist rightwing "think" tanks - where very little thinking gets done but they know how to socialize risk and privatize benefit. On this point, I would recommend to everyone a sophisticated academic talk by Professor Jamie Peck of University of British Columbia, called "Framing Detroit"that he gave on January 30, 2014 at the University of Michigan 'Detroit School.'

I live with this stuff and used to even get paid to understand it , and he totally knocked me out. It should be required for anybody before bloviating an opinion on Detroit today.

JB: We're talking about Detroit, your city. But, it's not just Detroit, Tom. Most of us live in or near urban centers. And many if not most of them are in decline, if not decay. It feels like Detroit is the petri dish for other decaying urban areas. I live in suburban Chicago. None of us are safe from the privatizers, the Koch-inspired agenda. Which city/cities will be next? It's unnerving to contemplate what that agenda, creeping stealthily across the country, could look like.

TS: I don't know if I could say it any better than that. Maybe "pre-fascist scary" instead of "unnerving?" Seriously, you hit the nail on the head. Let me try quoting the long piece I wrote for Counterpunchin March:"Capital is experimenting here with whatever it might have of a gated, contaminated, extreme-energy and-climate future. Hundreds of thousands of People are being used & abused here as pawns of an urban renewal (or "Negro removal") process, without principles, human rights values or human dignity. The gravity of our situation, and its importance as a lens for understanding what we must do, are as hard to overstate as they are to overstand."

JB: Well said, Tom. What haven't we talked about yet? What else would you like our readers to know?

TS: We've barely discussed the vicious racist aspect of Snyder's emergency management policy. The eventual inevitable slow failure of this brand of corporate blindness in the face of the planetary crisis of economic justice, ecological health and extreme energy that defines our time.

JB: Okay. Go for it!

TS: How hard it is to organize in the face of such a total assault on traditional liberal, constitutional norms. The role of foundation money is a real sore point" I could go on, but you get the picture. Check out Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management's Alternative Peoples Plan for Sustainability:"The restructuring and rebirth of Detroit will not be delivered by a state-imposed emergency manager, nor through Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings, foundation contributions, closed door deals, or other devious and misleading corporate schemes. Detroit's rebirth will be the result of the people's unrelenting demand for democratic self-governance, equal access to and management of the natural and economic resources of the city."

And in conclusion: "The Governor/EM's plan of adjustment is aimed at creating a whiter, wealthier city. We propose a plan that will put us on a sustainable path to enriched quality of life. Our plan calls for just relationships based on the vision of People, and for developing social and political infrastructure that will create a sustainable future. Our plan is a clear strategy for survival that will enable our city to thrive. The schemes of the governor/emergency manager and backroom bankruptcy deals reflect the unjust, racist and failed regional power dynamic that created these problems in the first place. In response, we are claiming our power to determine our own future, and transforming our relationships and our community."

JB: Hold on a sec. What do you mean when you refer to "the role of foundation money"?

TS: Opened a can of worms there, didn't I?

JB: Probably, but I'd like to know more.

TS: Long story short, left/liberal funders constrain imagination, resistance, movement, power and vision, limiting the possibilities of working class and People of Color organizing. Meanwhile Koch/ALEC and gazillions of neoliberal/libertarian funders build movements and control the ideological battlefield. An old and sordid story. In Detroit, several major foundations are pouring money into emergency management, privatization, education "deform" and what their pied piper, Rip Rapson of the Kresge Foundation, calls "a larger suite" of programs to complement emergency management, a corporate neoliberal vision of abandonment and land grabbing originally labeled "Detroit Works," now rebranded as "Detroit Future City." "Alignment" with their program is a litmus test for funding. A very hard thing to fight in a community desperate for money! And an incredibly powerful mechanism of divide-and-conquer politics, both seducing folks who in good faith want to help, but in many cases lack a detailed understanding of the political dynamics, and also incentivizing some more experienced folks to sit down, shut up and go along with things they would otherwise oppose, if they want to see a check.

JB: You live this every day. How exactly do the foundations become the Bad Guys? Are their intentions impure or just the application and their understanding of the problem?

TS: They become the bad guys by arrogantly assuming that their money and power can be imposed on the people of this community, together with undemocratic, unconstitutional and hostile political schemes that all boil down to depriving Detroiters of our freedom, our agency, our assets, our city and our power to govern ourselves. And then by funding unprincipled opportunists who exploit and expropriate Detroit's assets.

JB: How do you get out from under a non-elected, appointed Emergency Manager? It's hard to maneuver with that in place. Or is that not the place to start?

TS: That's a great question, and a perfect place to start. One of our late, great leaders here, General Baker of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and many, many battles for workers and African-Americans and others' human dignity, just passed last month. Gen said it best in one of his last talks in December 2013: "Look, it's real simple: We're in a class war." Note that this is the 50th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer. People don't win in a class war by appealing to the bosses' courts, constitutions or foundation grants. The vast inequality of resources is a given, but it's not a call for surrender. As Gen said in that same talk, "You have to make them play their cards so that even when they win, they lose."

Which brings us back to practical steps, like complaining to the UN that mass water shutoffs in Detroit violate fundamental human rights, and expose the true face of this great new 'emergency management' that Snyder's white Republican power structure claims is gonna "save" Detroit. And it brings us back to your nail-on-the-head observation that this show will be moving on from Detroit to your town sooner rather than later. I expect we may be spending the rest of our lives trying to figure out what Gen's comment - about making them play so even when they win they lose - means in this context. It's a great school for turning theory into practice, where there are so many issues, the water, the schools, the pensions, security, fire protection and on and on, practically everything about local community, really. It's not a battle we chose, it's one we simply have to fight. After all, the governor and his emergency management team have come here and taken over our whole local government.

JB: How's it going in the publicity department? It seems like this is a pretty egregious action, if you can get the word out about it.

TS: The national media reaction to the UN human rights complaint, and the High Commissioner's press release affirming that cutting off water to people who lack the ability to pay violates their human rights, has been phenomenal. There's growing awareness that the slick PR campaign being waged by Snyder and his stooges is covering up a really unjust and sordid reality, when they are paying these contractors to shut thousands of people a week off our water system, just to create some brief, transitory advantage in the negotiations over DWSD's future. People were very upset about pension and health care cuts, about turning our beautiful Belle Isle Park over to the state ostensibly to upgrade its facilities, and then seeing them transform it into a big race track for the Detroit Grand Prix, and giving hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare and valuable downtown real estate to the owners of the Red Wings for a new taxpayer-funded hockey arena, all in a city that's supposedly too broke to provide the most basic essential services. But these mass water shut-offs really bring it home. On the other hand, the local corporate media are still running the most ludicrous, virtually content-free pieces. A recent example is a conservative columnist's puff piece profileof Kevyn Orr.

One of his biggest and most mindless cheerleaders is quoted there: "Sandy Baruah, CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, says, "You can't have a meaningful conversation about Detroit without also talking about, or with, Kevyn Orr."

Hello? That's exactly the problem! Why should anybody who lives here be content that you can't even have a meaningful conversation about our city without talking with one man, appointed by a governor whom nobody here voted for? A guy whose law firm represents major city creditors, Wall Street banks, and he turns around and gives them a $19 million contract to run the city's restructuring and bankruptcy, so now they're running around the world marketing their services to governments facing deficits as the A team of municipal bankruptcy experts. How can they square that with the First Amendment protection of rights of free association and to petition government, among others?

The answer is by using the bankruptcy to stay (or stop) constitutional challenge to these unprecedented powers. Your vote: Forget it. Your right to go to court: Forget that too. Any accountability of your local government: Don't make me laugh. Jones Day has no reason in the world to do anything for ordinary Detroiters. They're working a corporate gouging operation on another whole level. If people can't see that in these mass water shut-offs, they're simply blind.

The Chamber President is also quoted in that same column as follows: "The word has penetrated deeply in the national investor community that Kevyn Orr is setting the table for Detroit's next chapter." I really like a couple readers' comments to that one. A lawyer said "But he neglects to mention Detroit is the main course." And a psychologist says: "I know another word for 'penetrated deeply." All this stuff would be even funnier if so many quite powerless people weren't so being badly hurt by emergency management. One anonymous genius put together a parody website with graphics, musc, video, etc. that has to be seen to be believed: kevynorr.com

JB: Thanks so much for filling us in on what's really going on in Detroit, Tom. Good luck and please keep us apprised of developments. Listen up, readers. If we don't stop this cancer destroying our cities, your own hometown could be next!

***

Allied Media Conference List of Key Web Sites, supplied to Tom

Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management (D-REM): http://www.d-rem.org/

COMMENT: This is intended to be our clearinghouse, including links to many of the things below. If you are interested in what we are saying in this presentation, this is where you go to learn more. Please pay special attention to the videos by Kate Levy and Halima Cassels, as well as the Peoples Alternative Plan provided here in hard copy. And special thanks to our brilliant web master Gregg Newsom of detroitcommunicator.com. We hope for an update shortly after arrival of the latest little Newsom!

Moratorium NOW!: http://moratorium-mi.org/

COMMENT: Primary source for information about pension theft and the role of Wall Street banks in exploiting and expropriating Detroit.

Satire & Education: http://www.kevynorr.com/

NO COMMENT: You have to see this one for yourself.

Next Chapter Detroit: http://www.nextchapterdetroit.com/

COMMENT: A very mixed bag of mainstream journalism, bankruptcy documents and -- frankly speaking -- elite lies aggregated and reposted by the foundation-funded Detroit Journalism Cooperative.

Detroit Bankruptcy Court Documents: http://www.kccllc.net/detroit/document/list/3666

COMMENT: 'The Kinko's of bankruptcy' and the place in California where Detroit's ballots will supposedly be counted.

Demos- The Detroit Bankruptcy: http://www.demos.org/publication/detroit-bankruptcy

COMMENT: A crucial report.

Michigan Citizen: http://michigancitizen.com/

COMMENT: Detroit's best weekly newspaper, especially columns by Shea Howell and Curt Guyette.

UN Human Rights Complaint regarding Detroit Water Shut-Offs: http://www.blueplanetproject.net/index.php/detroit-submission/

COMMENT: Must read to see that it's come to this!

Black Agenda Report: http://www.blackagendareport.com/

COMMENT: Most significant comprehensive radical analysis in Glen Ford's Detroit essays, and most comprehensive collection of Tom Stephens' essays on his BAR blog

Framing Detroit:

http://media.rackham.umich.edu/rossmedia/Play/afa23ac545364438b3d700748882d45e1d

COMMENT: Maybe the best single analysis from a highly sophisticated academic perspective of Detroit, austerity and neoliberalism, by Prof. Jamie Peck of University of British Columbia -- a speech delivered with slides at the University of Michigan Detroit School on January 30, 2014.