Detroit EM axes council head, union pacts, agency

[backwoodsbob]

DETROIT (AP) — Detroit's emergency manager took a series of decisive steps Thursday, telling unions he's canceling their contracts, ousting City Council President Charles Pugh for skipping work and outsourcing the failing public lighting department.


Contracts for the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees Council 25 and the Detroit Police Lieutenants & Sergeants Association will end when they expire in the coming weeks, said Bill Nowling, spokesman for state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr.


Orr also signed an order Thursday stripping the pay and authority from City Council President Charles Pugh, who has been absent from City Hall for undisclosed reasons. He's also been a no-show at recent council meetings and failed to acknowledge by a 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline that he would be returning to work.


Pugh also is the subject of a complaint the Detroit Public Schools received from the mother of a recent graduate who says the councilman had improper contacts with her teenage son.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-em-axes-council-head-union-pacts-agency-011646965.html

[HiPointDem]

1. Emergency dictatorship

[FrodosPet]

2. Why can't the feds and the state just give the city $30 billion to erase the debt and hire people?

Clean slate. No more interest payments. Pensions fully funded. Money to demolish all the dilapidated buildings and build urban green spaces. And then the ongoing revenues would be enough to pay the cops and firefighters and repair the streetlights and cut grass and foreclose on unpaid property taxes (which could then be used to provide low cost housing for tens or even hundreds of thousands of homeless people).

Not to mention getting rid of the E.M. and giving control back to the elected officials. No financial emergency means no need for an emergency financial manager.

[HereSince1628]

3. We don't have EM's for Milwaukee Co., but the non-resident Rs are seeking control

by destroying the principle of 'self-rule' that the R's themselves pushed for decades ago.

And I think this is much like the basic force driving EM's in Michigan.

Getting rid of local representative government in cities which are mostly blue, gives R's control they could never win in elections.

Moreover, because the R's doing this are anti-urban 'up-staters' they are more interested in pushing piratization as a philosophy with little concern for its impacts.

That attitude enables the Bane Capital model of 'pirateering' to be applied to cities... ban unions, dump benefits/retirement packages for public employees, sell the public assets and make them for-profit, and move the non-profit public works into the hands of a profiteer whose only way to make a profit is to slash pay and benefits of the public employees.

One of the downstream endpoints could look remarkably like a German work camp. A place where the poor work for housing and bread made from sawdust. Those that can't escape work until they drop, and when they drop, it is seen as a solution that 'eliminates poverty'.