A nation of Detroits.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Public employee pensions & municipal bankruptcy

The rightwing argument that public employees bankrupted Detroit is incredible on its face. But it is part of an ominous national push to raid pensions, give away tax dollars to corporations, and impose austerity on regular working people.

Never mind that Detroit has been hollowed out by job-exporting trade policies, deindustrialization, and American auto manufacturers' poor business decisions.

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Never mind that the city has stopped plowing local roads, or that you have to run to a main thoroughfare in the wintertime to pick up your mail.

Never mind that the average response to a 911 call takes fifty-eight minutes....

As economist Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, points out, Detroit was the big loser among the "inevitable winners and losers" we heard so much about when free trade was being foisted on the rust belt.

"The trade argument is: Yes, there are people who will lose, but society as a whole gains from these deals because prices go down," Dresser points out. "And with those gains, we could compensate the losers."

Guess what? The people of Detroit did not see that compensation.

"If any city has experienced the pain of U.S. trade policy, it's Detroit," says Dresser. But you have to look hard to find that big-picture background in the current national discussion about Detroit's bankruptcy.

Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager imposed on Detroit, appeared on NPR's All Things Considered to explain that for Detroit to grow again, people are going to have to make "painful sacrifices."

Who are those people? Elderly pensioners living on $19,000 a year on average. The size of their sacrifice has yet to be determined, but Orr would not rule out pension cuts of 50 percent. Keep in mind that these elderly people, who were guaranteed their retirement income, will not likely see the future benefits of a resurrected Detroit.

A handful of very smart people have talked about how wrongheaded the rightwing analysis of the economic crisis in Detroit is.

David Sirota points out in Salon that the city is still planning on spending $283 million on a taxpayer-financed hockey stadium, even as it tells its retired public service workers to stock up on cat food.

Paul Krugman argues that the disastrously wrong-headed analysis that endorsed austerity for Greece is now being foisted on Detroit as well.

Working people everywhere should be very leery of a rightwing propaganda push that paints teachers, union...