African public workers in Detroit got another bitter slap in the face Tuesday, December 3, 2013.
The colonial U.S. federal court ruled that the city of Detroit will not have to honor its commitment to its workers’ pensions as it proceeds with the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
More than 23,000 retired city workers—twice the number of people who are currently employed by the city—stand to lose 40 or 50 percent or more of their pensions. Many will struggle to survive and lose their homes.
For Detroit’s African working class—many of whom served the city of Detroit for more than 30 years—this is another blatant theft of our labor and resources by the colonial masters.
Neocolonial sell-out president Barack Hussein Obama happily gave more than $13 trillion in taxpayers’ money to bail out the super-rich white-power bankers of Wall Street.
The Bush and Obama administrations gave the white-owned auto industry an $80 billion bailout. But Obama has made it clear that African workers in Detroit will get no bailout from the U.S. government!
Once a vibrant predominately African city known for black power and dynamic African culture, Detroit was built on African labor in the U.S. auto industry.
For many years, work in car factories provided millions of Africans with the possibility of a stable financial future for them and their children.
Today, Detroit lays in shambles with only 700,000 people in a city that once bustled with 1.8 million people—nearly 90 percent of whom were African.
A mere 40 percent of Detroit’s streetlights and a third of the city’s ambulances are functioning. Whole residential neighborhoods lay crumbling without city services including lights and water.
Detroit’s abandoned factories, schools and high rise office buildings look like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie in which terrified inhabitants had to quickly flee a lethal catastrophe.
In fact, the world’s greatest catastrophe is parasitic capitalism, built on the backs of African and oppressed workers. Parasitic, blood sucking capitalism is now in a severe crisis due to the resistance of oppressed peoples all over the planet.
After Detroit went into bankruptcy earlier this year, Rick Snyder, the white Republican governor of Michigan took over Detroit’s elected city government.
Snyder installed neocolonial sell-out Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Manager of Detroit to guard the interests of the bankers and elite at the expense of the African working class.
Anyone who believes that African people are citizens of the United States or that we should use the hyphenated name “African-American” better wake up and see the truth!
To paraphrase Malcolm X: “I’m neither a Democratic nor a Republican, and I sure ain’t no American, and got sense enough to know it.”
Look around you. Nearly half a century after our fathers and mothers waged a life and death struggle for power over our own lives and an end to this violent colonial tyranny, the conditions in the African community are worse than ever.
Nearly half our children grow up poor and hungry. Almost 60 percent of our young people can’t find a job.
Every year three or four million of us are stuffed into colonial prison system in order to provide jobs and profit for white corporations and communities. And every 26 hours another one of us is shot down by the police on the brutal streets of America.
The United States of America would not exist without the genocidal theft of this land from the Native people and the rape of Africa that chained and enslaved us; stealing our labor, our freedom, our culture and our land.
Our stolen labor built the wealth of America and Europe. Now it is time to unite and liberate Africans and Africa. Use our labor to build for ourselves as a free and independent people under the leadership of the African working class.
We have stood up in Detroit once before, and we will stand up again.
Build the African People’s Socialist Party—the only future for African workers whether in Detroit, Haiti or Johannesburg!
African workers and peasants of the world unite to liberate Africa!