There's no way the Spirit of Detroit doesn't kind of want to punch Kevyn Orr.
Detroit's bankruptcy filing continues to move forward, with Christie's auction house
appraising the value of the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the city's great institutions and one that would be a centerpiece of any revitalization of Detroit. The city has notified bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes that they hope to have a restructuring plan in place
by the end of the year; he has imposed a March deadline.
And emergency manager Kevyn Orr is ... such an asshole.
Speaking to the reliable fluffers of the corporate right over at the Wall Street Journal, Orr said:
"For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy and rich," he explains. "Detroit has been the center of more change in the 20th century than I dare say virtually any other city, but that wealth allowed us to have a covenant [that held] if you had an eighth grade education, you'll get 30 years of a good job and a pension and great health care, but you don't have to worry about what's going to come."
While Orr's spokesman later
attempted to walk that back a hair, saying he was talking about the city's political leadership, not actually calling its blue-collar workers dumb and lazy, his meaning is pretty damn clear, and as Eclectablog writes:
Anyone who blames the workers for the problems of Detroit, a city that has lost nearly two thirds of its population over the past couple of decades, clearly has no clue about the reality of the situation.
And that's the guy the governor put in charge of the city, over its elected leadership, using a law that the state's voters repealed only to have the lame duck legislature pass a very slightly tweaked version of it weeks later. About that. Orr seems to have some
hurt fee-fees over both the accurate observation that his position is profoundly antidemocratic and the fact that the city's retirees are fighting to keep the $19,000 pensions they need to survive.
"People say I'm a dictator," Mr. Orr chuckles. "I don't appreciate that, but if I'm going to be one, I'm going to be benevolent."
To prove his benevolence, he describes unions suing to protect their retired members' pensions as "fifth grade stuff." Which, sure, maybe $19,000 a year does seem like fifth grade stuff to a big law attorney who's slumming it at $275,000 a year as Detroit's benevolent dictator. But for some people, people whose lives are now very much in Orr's hands, it's all they have after decades of work.