Friday, May 4, 2012

PressTV coverage and Two Detroits


Detroit held a featured segment of the OWS Week broadcast on PressTV. The General Electric shareholder meeting brought over 2,000 people coming from across the country to protest at the Renaissance Center and the surrounding streets. Protesters blocking traffic for upwards of an hour as the march overtook Jefferson Ave.

Stephen Boyle from Free Detroit - No Consent spoke with the reporter and offered his view of how the representative government and corporations continue to distance themselves from the people at large. Reductions in social services are leaving Detroiters with an overwhelming desire to leave Detroit. Those in need can go anywhere else in the nation and receive benefits better than Detroit can offer. At what point do eliminations stop? Within our Declaration we see the emergence of two Detroits: one thriving, one abandoned.

If mobility is cut off and social services restricted, those who rely on society will die. Gentrification of the city will occur as a new populace moves into the core of Detroit. Gated communities will flourish in the core as the poor are placed into perimeter encampments. This is how Mayor Bing, Governor Snyder, and the corporate/bank interests behind them plan to create pockets of welfare-serviced communities around the core of the city. The perimeter which fails to receive welfare will be blighted waiting for demolition and replanted as corporate farmland. Monsanto, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), and other agro-corporations will own or assist in growing genetically engineered crops in the newly formed corporate farms (reference Hantz Farms, a Monsanto affiliated farm planning to purchase 5,000 acres). This is the foreseeable future as it is showing up through privatization of transit, public lighting, education, water, and handing over Department of Human Services to state/corporate interests.

The people of the city have grown tired of fighting for human rights for centuries. Corporations have grown at the expense of the workers which sustain them. There is a due diligence to the people enabling their freedom and pursuit of happiness, which continues to erode as corporations globalize and leave a trail of waste they foist upon the society used to propel their success. Financial and political reforms are needed.


The people united will never be defeated.
We are the blood that courses through corporate veins.
When you stop the blood flowing, you stop expansion.
The people deserve more than what is being offered.

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