SUMMARY:The once formidable retail giant Sears files for bankruptcy protection. The company, which also owns Kmart, will continue to operate as executives try to reverse a downward spiral exacerbated by e-commerce. John Yang examines the company’s storied legacy and tumultuous fall with historian Jerry Hancock.
SUMMARY: Greece struck a debt deal after a long night of negotiations with European creditors. According to the preliminary deal, the nearly bankrupt country will receive a $95 billion bailout over three years, and be subject to tough austerity measures. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports from Greece and Judy Woodruff gets reaction from Eswar Prasad of Cornell University.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The nation of Greece and its creditors reached a preliminary deal to avert immediate financial collapse, but it demands that the struggling country make major concessions and means continued sacrifice and hardship for its people.
NewsHour special correspondent Malcolm Brabant has this report.
MALCOLM BRABANT (NewsHour): Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras emerged after a long night of bitter negotiations.
PRIME MINISTER ALEXIS TSIPRAS, Greece(through interpreter): Until the end, we battled to get an agreement to get the country back on its feet. We were faced with a very difficult decision within hard dilemmas. We took the responsibility to decide in order to avert the most extreme plans by conservative circles in the European Union.
MALCOLM BRABANT: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was one of those conservatives who ran a hard bargain with the Greeks. They seemed ready to quit until European Council President Donald Tusk, who is also president of Poland, persuaded them to keep at it.
DONALD TUSK, President, European Council: The decision gives Greece the chance to get back on track with the support of European partners. It also avoids the social, economic and political consequences that a negative outcome would have brought.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Meanwhile, in Athens, pensioners saw no reason to celebrate, as they queued up to withdraw money outside closed banks.
SUMMARY: Puerto Rico’s financial crisis has been well-documented over the last few weeks, but a new report in the Washington Post sheds light on how Congress may have played a role in the fiscal troubles being felt in the U.S. commonwealth. Michael Fletcher of The Washington Post joins Hari Sreenivasan from Baltimore with the latest.
HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Now to financial trouble in Puerto Rico, where leaders want to declare bankruptcy, but cannot, unless the U.S. Congress changes the law.
Puerto Rico announced last month it simply cannot pay $72 billion in debt. Congressional Democrats want to allow limited bankruptcy relief, but Republicans say it’s not enough and that leaders need to address the territory’s underlying budget issues.
Ironically, a new report in The Washington Post says Congress has actually played a contributing role in the fiscal trouble of the U.S. commonwealth.
Joining us now with the details, from Baltimore, is Michael Fletcher, who has been covering the story.
You were just down there a few weeks ago. So, what’s the U.S. responsibility in this crises?
MICHAEL FLETCHER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, it’s interesting. The political economy has been skewed for years by U.S. taxpayers essentially. In many ways, early on decades ago, that led to a kind of a development of the island as kind of this manufacturing hub, which is a very generous tax break.
The first ones to clothing and shoe manufactures. Then in 1970s, it kind of shifted to more capital-intensive businesses like pharmaceutical manufacturing. And that made Puerto Rico into one of the top prescription drug manufacturers in the world. At one point, something like 13 of the top 20 prescription drugs are actually made in Puerto Rico.
And in many ways, that development took away from other things the island might have done naturally, like develop more, its tourism sector or what have you.
It was fine as long as the tax break lasted, but then in 1996, Congress did away, it began to phase out that tax break, and ti was fully phase out since 2006. And since then, Puerto Rico’s been in recession.
HARI SREENIVASAN:And they can’t declare bankruptcy like Detroit can.
MICHAEL FLETCHER: They can’t. They’re treated just like states are under bankruptcy law.
[Un]like municipalities and hospital districts, things like that. They can — they can declare bankruptcy which gives them breathing room to reorganize their debts, and Puerto Rico cannot do that.
When Detroit became the largest city in the history of the United States to file bankruptcy in 2013, a question quickly emerged: Which city would be next?
Because conventional wisdom held that bloated pensions had bankrupted Detroit, the conversation revolved around other cities with large pension shortfalls, such as New York, Philadelphia and Jacksonville, Florida. Anti-union politicians used the opportunity to hold up Detroit as a boogeyman. Bruce Rauner, then a Republican candidate for Illinois governor, ran a campaign ad in 2013 that said, “Detroit just declared bankruptcy, and if we don’t change direction, Illinois is next,” explicitly invoking the state’s unfunded pension liability as the reason (it should be noted that this claim was untrue, as federal law bars states from filing bankruptcy).
All of this uproar rested on a basic falsehood in the dominant public narrative around Detroit, that pensions played a key role in driving the city bankrupt. But those who studied the bankruptcy closely know that the reverse is true: The city filed bankruptcy so that it could cut pensions.
Detroit’s bankruptcy was not borne out of financial necessity and was not a foregone conclusion. It was a political decision made by state officials. Gov. Rick Snyder and the Michigan Legislature chose to push the distressed city over the edge in order to accomplish two otherwise difficult political goals: slashing pensions and regionalizing the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. It was disaster capitalism at its finest.
Austerity hawks are now hoping to use the Detroit playbook in other cities to force the public to accept extreme measures to fix budget crises. And the bond markets seem to have finally settled on an answer to that question about which city will be the next Detroit: Chicago. Moody’s Investor Service, one of the three major credit rating agencies, just downgraded Chicago’s credit rating to junk level—the municipal equivalent of a subprime credit score, cautioning potential lenders that the city may not be able to pay them back—making it the lowest-rated major city in the country after Detroit.
Chicago is not an obvious choice. It remains the third largest city in the country, has a thriving downtown and is home to some of the largest and most profitable corporations and wealthiest people in the world. Chicago clearly has money, even though its distribution is wildly unequal.
But as was the case in Detroit, the talk of a Chicago bankruptcy has little to do with the city’s financial health and much to do with a broader political agenda to obliterate the social safety net and slash pensions. Even though there are numerous reasons why Chicago is not going bankrupt, the fact is that there has been a sustained effort by politicians like Mayor Rahm Emanuel to create a financial crisis and then use the threat of bankruptcy in order to usher in deep and painful cuts, just as the Right was able to do in Detroit.
Chicago is the test case for whether the Detroit playbook can be run in other, more prosperous cities. If it succeeds there, cities across the country will likely emulate this strategy to balance budgets on the backs of working-class communities while letting banks, big corporations and the rich off the hook.
The Detroit playbook
Most of us learn about bankruptcy through games like Monopoly or Wheel of Fortune, where being bankrupt is synonymous with being broke. But when it comes to municipalities, not only is bankruptcy a choice, it is a political choice. Elected officials decide whether to do it, when to do it and how to do it, and their primary reasons for doing it do not even have to be financial.
Municipal bankruptcy is also unique in other ways. In a corporate bankruptcy, for example, a company can be liquidated and all of its assets can be sold off to pay its creditors. However, as a matter of practicality, a city cannot be liquidated. Detroit is not Circuit City. If all its assets were sold off—streets, buses, police and fire stations—what would happen to the people who continued to live there post-bankruptcy? Because municipal bankruptcies are premised on the notion that cities should survive their bankruptcy and one day even thrive, the goal is not to obliterate a city in order to pay down its outstanding debt.
Under Chapter 9 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, municipalities may file bankruptcy if they are unable to pay their debts as they come due. In order to emerge from bankruptcy, they don’t need to be able to pay all of their outstanding debts right away, but rather to pay their bills on time. Just as a homeowner with a 30-year mortgage only needs enough money to make each monthly payment, cities similarly just need to be able to pay their bills, one bill at a time.
During Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, who had been appointed by Snyder to run the city during its fiscal crisis, repeatedly asserted that the city had $18 billion in outstanding debt, so as to imply that the city had to come up with $18 billion in savings to get out of bankruptcy. This was not true.
First of all, that $18 billion number itself was inflated using non-standard accounting assumptions and by including debt that did not actually belong to the city itself, such as the debt of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. But more importantly, the $18 billion figure was irrelevant for the purposes of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, since there was never any expectation that the city pay all of its long-term debts immediately. What mattered, according to an analysis by the think-tank Demos, was the $198 million cash flow shortfall that the city faced that fiscal year. Detroit’s expenses were $198 million more than its revenues, so it could not pay its bills as they came due.
The $198 million shortfall could have been addressed fairly easily—in part, simply by undoing state actions that had pushed Detroit into bad financial straits in the first place. For example, Detroit had taken a major financial hit over the course of 2011 and 2012, when Snyder and the Michigan Legislature decided to cut annual state revenue sharing with the city by $67 million. Restoring that funding would have filled one-third of the city’s shortfall. Second, there were state-imposed restrictions on the city’s ability to raise local taxes, dating back to the 1990s. Lifting those restrictions would have allowed the city to raise taxes and bring in new revenue.
Or the legislature could have passed a law requiring suburban employers to automatically deduct city income tax for reverse commuters who lived in Detroit. The city instead had to rely on reverse commuters to voluntarily pay their taxes. According to a study commissioned by the Mayor’s Office, in 2009 alone, Detroit lost $142 million as a result of this loophole. But instead, the $18 billion figure was held up to create a greater sense of urgency in order to justify drastic cuts at the expense of public employees and wrest control of the water department from the city.
Conservatives in Michigan had long been scapegoating Detroit’s pension obligations as the source of its fiscal problems, and Snyder began enacting policies to undermine pensions his first year in office. However, the Michigan Constitution, like that of many other states, protects government workers’ pensions from cuts—since pensions are, after all, deferred wages for work that has already been done. Federal bankruptcy law, however, does not protect pensioners when a city declares bankruptcy. Detroit was a test case for whether municipalities could get around their state constitutions by filing bankruptcy under Chapter 9. In 2013, during Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings, a federal judge ruled that they can, because federal law trumps state law.
Then there was the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), a source of political power for the majority African-American city, which many white suburban residents had grown to resent. White suburban voters are an important constituency for Snyder, who needs them to make up for his low approval rating in Detroit, Michigan’s largest city.
The election of Coleman Young as Detroit’s first African-American mayor in 1973 accelerated white flight out of the city. Even though most of Detroit’s white families moved to the suburbs, they were still dependent on the city-run water department, which serves most of southeastern Michigan and 40 percent of the state’s population. This created a lot of tension. Whenever there were service problems or rate hikes, suburban residents blamed it on the mismanagement by what they believed to be corrupt and incompetent city officials. While corruption was a real problem in Detroit, including in the DWSD, these charges often fed off racial tensions.
Through bankruptcy, the state was finally able to take control of the water department out of Detroit’s hands and regionalize it. In one stroke, Snyder had achieved two long-sought political goals.
The next Detroit?
Politicians have been raising the specter of a Detroit-style bankruptcy in Chicago for a couple of years now— most recently in the mayoral runoff election this spring, when Sen. Mark Kirk commented that Chicago could end up like Detroit if Mayor Emanuel lost. But the threat never seemed credible to most people who were actually familiar with Chicago, because Chicago appears to be a fundamentally prosperous city. Then, in May, Moody’s Investor Service downgraded the credit ratings of both the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools to junk level. Suddenly, the threat seemed much more real.
The downgrades could force the city and the school district to hand over as much as $2.5 billion in early payments and penalties to banks on various financial deals. The city was forced to pay penalty interest rates on a $674 million bond offering, which will cost taxpayers an extra $70 million. The downgrades themselves were a direct response to an Illinois Supreme Court decision affirming the state constitution’s protection of government workers’ pensions, effectively prohibiting the state and local governments from slashing pensions to balance their budget. Mayor Rahm Emanuel would not be allowed to cut pensions and pay debts. Chicago seemed to be running out of options. Talk of a bankruptcy suddenly no longer seemed so farfetched.
Except that it is, because the political will is not there. Emanuel does not want his legacy to be that he bankrupted the third largest city in the country. Even though wealth and income are very unequally distributed across the city, Chicago still enjoys a healthy tax base and, unlike Detroit, has no statutory limits on its ability to raise local taxes (although it cannot implement a city income tax without state authorization). Chicago will not go bankrupt because the mayor will raise taxes if necessary to avoid that fate.
There is one other big reason why Chicago will not go bankrupt: It can’t. Under Illinois state law, municipalities are not allowed to file bankruptcy. Chapter 9 delineates the process for municipal bankruptcy, but it is up to each individual state whether to let cities use that process. Michigan does. Illinois, like 25 other states, does not.
As was the case in Detroit, politicians are invoking bankruptcy in Chicago to create public support for slashing pensions. Like Michigan’s, the Illinois Constitution also protects government workers’ pensions. There was a bill in the Illinois Legislature this session to allow municipal bankruptcies, and its chief proponents made no secret of the fact that their goal was to let cities use bankruptcy to get around the state constitution’s pension protections. Elected officials from smaller cities, such as Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey, heralded the municipal bankruptcy bill as a godsend that would allow them to “set aside the unmanageable and unsustainable labor contracts and pension agreements with which local taxpayers have been saddled across the state.”
The bill was supported by Illinois Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who advocated the use of bankruptcy to help municipalities deal with their budget woes. Of course, he, too, was taking a page out of the Detroit playbook. He created a financial crisis for cities across the state by proposing a 50 percent reduction in municipalities’ share of state income tax revenue. Like state officials did to Detroit, Rauner inflicted financial hardship on cities and then dangled bankruptcy in front of them as the solution.
The municipal bankruptcy bill did not pass before the end of the session on May 31, but even the threat of such legislation can be a powerful tool for officials to strengthen their hand in contract negotiations with public sector unions and convince the broader public to accept an austerity agenda.
The predatory lending crisis no one talks about
Austerity hawks have done a great job of selling budget shortfalls as the result of reckless overspending by incompetent and corrupt government officials. As a result, the solution gets framed as a choice between cutting pensions or slashing the social safety net. Working-class communities lose either way, while the 1% remains untouched.
But the real problem with public budgets is that there is not enough revenue coming into public coffers. Since the Reagan Revolution, there has been a sustained effort to delegitimize government and suppress taxes. Tax rates for corporations and top income-earners have declined at precisely the moment that the United States has seen the most explosive population growth, leaving all levels of government unable to afford to pay for the basic services that communities need to function. As a result, government borrowing has skyrocketed.
While it is sound public policy to use debt to fund long-term capital projects, it is deeply problematic when governments are forced to borrow money to deal with revenue shortfalls. It is even more problematic when they are doing so as a result of a concerted effort to suppress taxes by the same banks and people they are borrowing from. Banks and the wealthy created a crisis by lobbying hard to suppress taxes, and then they use that crisis to enrich themselves—a page right out of the Detroit playbook.
When cities and states borrow money by issuing bonds, the lenders are typically high-wealth individuals, who purchase the bonds to get a tax break. It is a perverse system through which, rather than paying their fair share in taxes, the wealthy are instead able to lend that money to us, charge us interest for it, and then claim a further tax break on it.
The banks that underwrite municipal bonds also profit by selling cities addon products like interest rate swaps. As municipal debt exploded, from $361 billion in 1981 (about $940 billion in today’s dollars) to $3.7 trillion in 2012, banks started targeting cash-strapped cities with more and more of these add-ons, which had high costs and hidden risks, were overly complex and were often designed to fail. They were predatory finance deals, much like the predatory mortgages targeted at cash-strapped homeowners. Some of these practices were illegal, while others were merely unethical. The effect was that banks collected billions in fees from borrowing that was necessitated in the first place by their refusal to pay their fair share in taxes.
At the same time that this was happening, anti-government conservatives started sounding the alarm over rising government debt in order to make the case for privatizing services. This allowed many of the same corporations that had lobbied for lower taxes to then profit off the revenue crisis they had helped create by literally buying up public assets, such as tollways and parking meters, and then charging us to use them.
Because state and local governments did not have enough tax revenue coming in, they often opted for “pension holidays” to make ends meet, skipping payments to the pension fund. Over time, this created large unfunded pension liabilities. In effect, cities and states borrowed money from pensioners to make up for revenue shortfalls. Now austerity hawks are using these unfunded liabilities to argue for slashing pensions, even though it was their own anti-tax policies that caused the problem.
A progressive playbook
We need to flip the Detroit playbook on its head to create a new class of winners, working class communities. We must reject the paradigm in which Moody’s points a gun to our head and forces us to choose between closing schools and throwing seniors under the bus. We cannot allow austerity hawks to manufacture crises in order to push radically regressive agendas that balance the budgets on the backs of those who can least afford it.
We need to define the “austerity” problem as what it is—a lack of revenue caused by the refusal of Wall Street banks, big corporations and millionaires to pay their fair share in taxes— and put forth solutions to make them pay. This includes progressive revenue measures: We can pass a millionaires tax and a financial transactions tax, close corporate tax loopholes and end subsidies for profitable companies. It also includes policies to stop Wall Street from gouging taxpayers, like renegotiating predatory banking fees and toxic financial deals, and creating public banks to cut out Wall Street altogether.
We must reframe the choice for elected officials as one between the 99% and the 1%. Will Chicago’s Mayor Emanuel close another 50 schools to balance the Chicago Public Schools budget, or will he sue the banks that likely broke federal law by selling the school district predatory interest rate swaps that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars? Will Rauner cut state aid to cities in half and force them to slash essential public services, or will he fight for a millionaires tax? Whose side is he on?
A quick Google search shows that nearly every major city in America has been called “the next Detroit” at some point in the last two years. The Right plans to use the Detroit playbook across the country to force the general public to accept unconscionable cuts to public works while letting the true culprits off the hook. We need to expose the people and corporations who are profiting from the crises that they created, and force them to pay their fair share.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Nearly 16 months after Detroit filed for bankruptcy, a federal judge approved an unprecedented and complex plan today that would bring the city out of bankruptcy and is designed to give it a fresh start.
The plan allows Detroit to shed $7 billion of debt, reinvest more than a billion dollars into neglected public service, cut pensions of general city retirees, and cut payments to bondholders.
Hari Sreenivasan has more on the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):One crucial component of the plan that came together in the past few months is a so-called grand bargain. It allows the city to accept more than $800 million from nonprofit foundations, the state and others over two decades. That deal protects the city from selling a noted art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts and reduces the size of pension cuts.
The Ford Foundation has donated the most money to the grand bargain, $125 million in all.
Its president, Darren Walker joins me now.
Thanks for being with us.
So, my first question is, what are nonprofit foundations doing in what seems like a bankruptcy bailout?
DARREN WALKER, Ford Foundation: Well, we’re not in the business of solving bankruptcies, but we do solve big problems and work with leaders at the city level and the community level, public and private sectors, to help solve community problems.
And this is one example of a group of foundations coming together at the behest of Judge Gerald Rosen to help solve this challenge.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, is this a template for other cities that might be in financial straits?
DARREN WALKER:This is not a template for other cities, but there are many lessons here.
This was a complicated $20 billion bankruptcy with thousands of creditors and many contested issues. But our focus, which was on saving the Detroit Institute of the Arts and ameliorating the situation for the workers of the city, particularly those retirees under the pension fund, were — that was what we were able to help accomplish.
But this doesn’t mean that other cities are going to look to foundations to solve their bankruptcy issues. This is not a template for that.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now: how Detroit is tackling a staggering amount of blight with some unusual help. The city is going through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Earlier today, a judge ruled that Detroit is permitted to shut off water for residents if they don’t pay their bills. This comes as the city is under a great deal of pressure to turn around its larger deteriorating situation, including thousands of shuttered buildings.
Special correspondent Christy McDonald from Detroit Public Television has our story, as part of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation and the Renaissance Journalism Project of the Ford Foundation.
CHRISTY MCDONALD, Detroit Public Television: A demolition crew at work in Northwest Detroit. This one crew will knock down up to 10 houses in a day. Ronald Garrison lives next door to this one, vacant for years. Trespassers looted it of anything of value.
RONALD GARRISON: The man down the street boarded it up. And they used to come rip the boards off and still go back in there. And he would have to come board it up again.
CHRISTY MCDONALD: The numbers are in. There are nearly 80,000 dilapidated structures across the city of Detroit, a number so high because of scrappers, vandals tearing everything of value out of vacant properties, leaving them open to the elements. Once there is structural damage, the houses have to come down.
DERRICK WATTS: Oh yes.
The scrapping is so rampant, Derrick Watts says even inhabited homes can be targets.
DERRICK WATTS: You have to watch your house even if you go on vacation. You can go on vacation, and come back and your house will be scrapped. So you got to watch it, really, 24 hours a day, because that’s the thing now. That’s the hustle now.
CHRISTY MCDONALD: With the city bankrupt and operating under an emergency manager, Detroit’s new mayor, Michael Duggan, is focusing on the demolition of the tens of thousands of houses stripped beyond repair.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Nine months after it became the largest city in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy, Detroit is drawing closer to a deal on how to protect current and former city workers from deep pension cuts.
Until recently, officials had been warning of painfully large pension reductions. The shift was announced yesterday, and, today, leaders of the retired police and firefighters group voted in favor of it. Pensions for those retirees had faced a pension cut of up to 14 percent. Under the new deal, they wouldn’t take a cut. Other civilian workers faced a reduction that could have been as high as 34 percent. That’s been scaled back to 4.5 percent. Any action on pensions is being watched by other cities that confront huge debt.
And Christy McDonald of Detroit Public Television is here to fill in the picture.
Welcome back to the program.
Christy McDonald, am I right that there were these dire warnings up until just a day or so ago that pension cuts could be enormous?
CHRISTY MCDONALD, Detroit Public Television: Absolutely, Judy.
And that’s probably part of the negotiation process. You don’t come to the table first with your best deal. You have to start the negotiation. And those negotiations have been coming fast and furious ever since the city put its first plan of adjustment on the table about a month or so ago, which really is the road map of how Detroit is going to get itself out of bankruptcy.
And so there’s been a lot of back and forth, but there’s also been a lot of moving parts in different aspects to deal to try to offset those pension cuts. And it’s something called the grand bargain is what we’re calling it here in the city of Detroit.
What it is, is about $815 million that would help protect art at the DIA from being liquidated and sold to offset those pension cuts. Some of that money would come from foundations and also the Detroit Institute of Arts itself, but $350 million of that would also come from the state.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, what turned this around, because there was a serious concern that the retirees were going to take a big hit? What broke the dam?
CHRISTY MCDONALD: Well, when you take a look at this entire process, no one is going to be happy at the end of a bankruptcy process. No one is really going to win.
You know that the banks are going to take a severe haircut, but really the most vulnerable people of all in this entire process are those retirees, the people who worked for the city of Detroit and were promised a pension at the end of it, and it was actually protected by the state constitution.
Well, the bankruptcy judge said in the beginning — this is federal bankruptcy court — those pensions are going to be allowed to be touched. So, everyone knew and was looking at this pension issues and the retirees, knowing that some sort of special protection would have to come towards them. And so I think that you have people working at the state level.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Finally: the choices ahead as Detroit moves forward with bankruptcy.
Today's ruling by a federal judge begins to clear the way for it to happen, and he said public pensions could be cut as part of other changes aimed at shedding billions in debt. Unions and pension funds had argued that Michigan's state Constitution protected those pensions. ---- CHRISTY MCDONALD, Detroit Public Television: It was.
But, Judy, he had to answer several legal questions before he could clear the way for Detroit's eligibility for Chapter 9. One of those is, is the city insolvent? And the judge found, yes, the city is insolvent. It can't pay its debts. And no one really argued that point there. There is an $18 billion debt.
The other question he had to answer was, did the city negotiate in good faith with its creditors before they even filed for bankruptcy? And while he chastised the city and said, you know what, the city really didn't negotiate in good faith, he moved to the next legal question was, did the city -- was it even possible for them to negotiate?
And he said it really wasn't, given the fact they had 100,000 creditors and an $18 billion debt. And then the other question he had to answer was, was it constitutional to file for bankruptcy? And, indeed, he said, yes, it was.
And, interestingly enough, the judge said that Detroit should have and could have filed for bankruptcy even years ago, given the financial situation it is in.
SUMMARY: Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder took the stand in bankruptcy court to testify about the decision-making process the city went through before filing in order to prove that Detroit is insolvent. Jeffrey Brown gets an update on the city's struggle to right its teetering finances from Christy McDonald of Detroit Public Television.
SUMMARY: The city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy in July, and now it must prove to a judge that the conditions necessitate that protection. But some pension funds, unions and retirees are fighting the filing. Jeffrey Brown gets an update from Matthew Dolan of The Wall Street Journal on Detroit's finances.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): Next: a pair of dispatches from Detroit at an important moment, starting with a key trial over the city's bankruptcy filing. Detroit's leaders say the city is $18 billion in debt, forcing a move to Chapter 9. But they also must persuade a judge the city has met all of the requirements to do so. And opponents say that's not the case.
SUMMARY: Detroit residents are hoping to breath new life into their communities, despite the city's filing for bankruptcy earlier this year. Neighborhoods are working to attract developers to rehab blighted buildings, create new jobs and assist would-be buyers and renters. Jeffrey Brown reports on the optimism driving their efforts.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): In July, Detroit became the largest American city ever to file for bankruptcy. That process continues to unfold, and much of the news since has been grim.
But, as Jeffrey Brown found recently, there's another side to the story of this troubled city.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
LINK DISCLAIMER:
There is no guarantee that any link provided in this blog will always work, especially for older links. The validity of any link is governed by the source-site policies. Some sites will archive articles and require subscription to access. Very small sites, such as a local town newspaper, may not archive at all.
