And cometh, one and all good commoners, that ye may bow and obey, and swear fealty to His Highness, Baron Orr, lord of the barony of Detroit, decider of the realm, vessel of His High Holy Majesty, Emperor Walker, long may he reign.
Right, back to work then, ye filthy mongrels!
(read in Eric Idle's snootiest voice)
They form worker's cooperatives, which have all of the decision making and none of the shareholders. They've been doing well in the wake of being abandoned.
As well, your contempt for an entire city's worth of people and your implication that the manufacturing heart of the USA abscessed because people refused to live like serfs in a company town is heartless and crude.
Come-on, the "tax-base" (read: middle-class, educated white people) FLED the city to the suburbs in the 1950s & 1960s. Remember, Coleman Young tried to blame 'white flight' on the highway system, decades ago!
The reality is that intelligent people of all races, mostly white, started to get the hell out of the city because they correctly saw where Detroit was heading.
The majority of the people who were left did & do not value education. The lucky ones got union jobs, and many of those workers fled the city once they could afford to do so, as-did many of the union & non-union businesses.
Detroit has been a cesspool since the early 1970s, when the residents decided it was more important for their elected officials & other city leadership to be black than to be competent, decent, educated people. Sadly, that's still the case (can you imagine the uproar if the Emergency Financial Manager was white?), and Detroiters richly deserve the situation that they are currently in (& have basically been in for at least 3 decades).
No matter how bad the finances of Detroit are, the Governor of Michigan and his Teabagger Republicans surely cannot legally set aside elected officials. we need a comprehensive voting act to ban actions like this, gerrymandering, and other attempts to deny voter rights. All Americans ought to be able to get behind such a law. In this particular case, it's hard for me to believe that should a suit be brought before the Supreme Court (much less lower courts), the Michigan EFM law would not be ruled unconstitutional. There is a racist dynamic going on. If white and/or wealthier citizens have fled Detroit, it falls to the state to help pick up some of the bills. My sympathies are with the residents of this great American city.
What would happen if everyone simply ignored him? If the police just went about their business. If the guards didn't stop people who would normally be in the building. If notices of city meetings still got printed and attended. If the city treasurer continued to send out checks. And if the citizenry made sure that the local bank the city did business with made it clear to that bank that this manager's signature needed special handling - in the 'I am sure it is here somewhere' folder.
What would happen?
Pages