Detroit Now, Harlem Is Next

Read this interview, Harlem.  It is from Lamar Lemmons of Detroit, Michigan, by Bill Roberts of larouchepac.  It shows how the cities, the poor are targeted.  Obama did not want to be an FDR.  He is sort of another Bill Clinton administration, but without any of the positive features.  It's true, Glass Stegall or die.


Lamar Lemmons (President Detroit School Board, former State Representative MI-3)
· Bill Roberts (former candidate for Congress MI-11, LaRouchePAC Policy Committee)
July 21, 2013
MATTHEW OGDEN: We're on the line here today with Mr. Lamar Lemmons, who's currently the President of the Detroit Board of Education. He is a former state legislator in the Michigan state legislature, who served from 1999 until 2007; and after serving that term came to run for the Detroit Board of Education, receiving a majority of the citywide at large vote, and was later elected by his colleagues to serve as the president of that body. When Mr. Lamar Lemmons was state legislator, he served as the representative of the east of Detroit. I'm also joined on the line today by Bill Roberts who is a former congressional candidate, who ran in 2012 for the Congressional Democratic nomination in the 11th District of Michigan, and Bill Roberts has been right in the middle of the situation in Detroit over the past recent years. He is on record testifying to Detroit City Council saying that the necessary solution had to be to pass Glass-Steagall on a national level, and to immediately institute a Franklin Roosevelt style emergency reconstruction of, not just Detroit, but the nation as a whole.
However, because that policy has not yet been adopted, we now received the news on Thursday of last week, that Detroit has become the largest city in the history of the United States to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. This came on the heels of several months of an emergency financial manager by the name of Kevyn Orr, negotiating and threatening city workers, city pensioners, to take a major cut in their pension funds and in their obligations that they city owed to them, using blackmail, saying if they didn't agree to voluntarily take a cut, the city would be forced to enter into bankruptcy.
And in fact, that is what has happened. The bankruptcy petition has been filed, in violation of the Michigan state Constitution, and now this is receiving national headlines everywhere, and people are acknowledging that this is something which stretches beyond Detroit, and is threatening many cities in the nation as a whole.
So, Lamar, thank you for joining us. Let me ask you first off, if you can just give us some background on what the situation is there on the ground in Detroit from your vantage point, and what your involvement in the situation leading up to today has been?
LAMAR LEMMONS: Well, first of all, let me say this: I, too, am supportive of an FDR like administration and as a matter of fact, I had really hoped that Barack Obama would be the second coming of FDR, and not a rehashed Bill Clinton Administration, which is what he is in my opinion, unfortunately.
It is imperative that Glass-Steagall be reinstituted, and I thought that the President understood that. I also thought that the President would institute a massive urban policy, the likes that Roosevelt introduced with the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, which would help stimulate our economy. Detroit has been in a depression for decades now, -- the country may have been in a recession, but Detroit has been in a depression. The banks have plundered and pillaged, and we're the capital in the world of abandoned home and property: There are more abandoned buildings and properties in the city of Detroit, than anywhere else in the world.