Southwest Detroit residents speak to D’Artagnan Collier campaign
By Jack Cody
30 June 2009
On July 1st, starting at 7pm, D’Artagnan Collier, the Social Equality Party’s candidate in the 2009 mayoral election, will address workers in Southwest Detroit at a public meeting to be held at the Holy Redeemer Church on the corner of Junction St. and West Vernor Ave. Several of Collier’s supporters spent the Afternoon Saturday distributing information and talking to workers within the community of Mexicantown.
At the meeting, Collier will make the case that the problems facing Detroit workers can only be solved only by forming an independent political party of the working class and breaking with the Democrats and the Republicans, the two parties of big business. In a recent video statement released on Youtube (post link), Collier said: “if I am elected I will immediately call for the occupation of factories and schools in preparation for a general strike” (get verbatim quotation).
The community of Southwest Detroit has been in steady decline since capital began a major offensive against the working class in the 1980s. In 1987 the Fleetwood Body GM plant, located near Southwest Detroit, closed. Fleetwood at one time employed 6,000 workers. The closure of the plant was a major milestone in the decline of Mexicantown, and one that could not have been accomplished without the full complicity of the UAW and the Democratic Party.
This attack against the working class in Southwest Detroit has been greatly accelerated by the Obama Administration as a representative of Wall Street. The solution of the financial aristocracy to the current economic crisis, a crisis precipitated by their own reckless stock market speculation, entails nothing short of a fundamental restructuring of class relations throughout the US. If Wall Street and Obama have their way, working class conditions in Southwest Detroit will be reduced to the conditions of the Great Depression.
One in three workers in Mexicantown already live below the national poverty threshold. The current unemployment rate in the City of Detroit stands at 22 percent, and climbing. This figure does not even represent the extent of the real problem. As several workers told our reporters, underemployment is an even bigger problem that gets obscured by the manner in which unemployment figures are reported. Many in the area work only a couple of days per week, for a net income that renders any sort of decent living standards impossible.
Although dilapidated, Mexicantown is the only area of urban Detroit that does not have the feeling of a ghost town. Located in the pocket between Michigan Ave/Highway 12 and I-75, Mexicantown is the most multi-cultural part of the city of Detroit, with large populations of Mexican, Italian and Polish immigrants. While other parts of Detroit have continued to experience emigration in mass numbers over the last decade, Mexicantown has grown, albeit at a much slower pace than the national average.
The sense of community that has managed to persist through these trying conditions accounts for the social resistance that has been spontaneously mobilized in recent years. The community has come out in large numbers to oppose the shutdown of the public education system in Detroit, a program that is being orchestrated by the Democrats that hold virtually all levels of office within the city and municipal governments.
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm created a new position, euphemistically entitled the Emergency Financial Director of the Detroit public school system, to oversee the systematic dismantling of the Detroit Public School system (DPS). In March of this year Robert Bobb officially assumed this position, for an annual salary of $260,000, with broad authority to implement cost cutting measures as he sees fit. On May 12, 2009, Robert Bobb unveiled the details of his plan, which consisted of permanently closing 29 public schools throughout the greater Detroit area, and the firing of some 33 principals.
The public outcry against Bobb’s program has been substantial. On June 4th, concerned workers in Southwest Detroit spoke out at a public hearing against Bobb’s decision to fire Rebecca Luna, the principal of nearby Western International High School. Parents and students insisted that Luna had acted as a dedicated principal known for working closely with troubled students. These pleas came to no avail.
On May 21, 2009 hundreds of students took to the streets of Southwest Detroit to protest Bobb’s program.
While these examples demonstrate the anger and frustration that is brewing beneath the surface of Southwest Detroit, only an independent political party of the working class can channel this spontaneous resistance into organized struggle. Workers and students must actively oppose the shutdown of the public education system and the shutdown of the automobile industry in Detroit by occupying factories and schools. This is the perspective that the SEP and D’Artagnan Collier are trying to bring to the city of Detroit, and the international working class as a whole.
Our correspondent tailed one team of volunteers as they made their way through the streets of Mexicantown talking to workers.
Upon receiving the flyer for D’Artagnan Collier, Lou Davis said, “Anything would be better than what we have in there now. I could put my dog in office and it would be better than David Bing. As soon as he came into office, he just put all the same people into the same positions. Of course nothing is going to change if you keep all the same corrupt people around you.”
Don McMurdie told our correspondents he had lost his trucking company in the late 1990s. “I lost my trucks, and my house. I had to live on the streets for two and a half years as a homeless veteran. I have a place now, but it was rough for a while.
“I get $985 a month from the VA [US Department of Veteran’s Affairs]” continued McMurdie. “It is barely enough to live on. I refinanced my house so I could help my sister pay her mortgage. She had medical problems, and I had to help her because she didn’t have money to pay her medical bills and her mortgage. It ends up we both lost our houses. I had my house for fifty years.
“I read an article,” said McMurdie “that said if you took all the money they gave to Wall Street to bailout the banks and divided it up it would be $300,000 for every person in the country.”
When asked if they had been affected by the current economic crisis, the response was virtually universal: “There are no jobs,” said McMurdie, Davis, Margarita Márquez, María de Cambio, Miriam Aguilar, Salvaro Brillones and José Sánchez.
Márquez used to work in an auto parts factory, but is currently unemployed. “I have been out of work for 7 months,” said Márquez. “There is no help from anywhere. There used to be programs to help people if they were out of work, but everything is being cut.”
“I know a lot of people who are out of a job,” said Aguilar. “Even more are working less. They are working less hours and making less money.”
Sánchez and Brillones repeated this point. “I am only get picked one or two days a week,” said Brillones. “It is a robbery, they pay 7 dollars an hour.”
“There is no work anywhere,” said Sánchez. “We will do anything. We used to pick tomatoes, or work on the cattle farms, but now we can’t get anything. And they rob us. We don’t make enough money to live.”
Most workers did not need to be told that the Democrats, Republicans and so-called trade unions do not represent the interests of the working class. “S**t,” said Lou Davis when Collier’s supporters told him the Democrats and Obama represent the interests of big business. “I have been in this city my whole life. I know that. I remember when Coleman Young was elected. I am an old-school thug. Now we got Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers.
“At one time they were talking about building a public transportation system that could take people from here to Rochester to work in the factories. Look at these streets. Can you picture them with rails running down the middle? You know why that got squashed don’t you? We are in the automobile capitol of the world.”
Some people still believe in Obama, however. When asked what she thinks of the Obama administration and the Democrats, Miriam Aguilar replied, “I think he is doing a good job. It takes time, and he has only been in office a few months. The economy is starting to improve, and it hopefully it will keep growing.”
Consciousness lags behind reality. The truth is that living conditions are not going to improve for working class people in Southwest Detroit. In fact, just the opposite is true, they are going to get much worse.
