Denier Chickens Coming Home To Roost

The “rescue” of the Detroit Institute of Arts has resolved nothing
By David Walsh
20 November 2014
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/11/20/resc-n20.html

The population of Detroit and beyond is currently under bombardment from the media and political establishment to the effect that the city has been “brought back from the brink,” “reborn,” and generally rescued through the shrewdness, generosity and even “sacrifice” of the elite.

Since the rich in America are criminal and predatory, and refuse as a matter of principle to give up a penny of their ill-gotten gains, this propaganda barrage ought to be viewed with the greatest skepticism.

In reality, the “Grand Bargain” imposed on Detroit includes robbing the legally protected pensions of thousands of retirees and gutting their health benefits, extorting $100 million from the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), and carrying out other violations of basic democratic rights. It opens the door to further savage attacks on wages, benefits and public services, which will not be long in coming. The precedent has been set...

This post is not about the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), even though I have "deked" you into thinking is was.

This is about (1) inability to grasp the necessity of action, and (2) inability to act.

In the 1990s there were early warnings about the coming public pension debacle, as benefits continued to outstrip reasonable estimates of future revenues. This also held true of private pensions... General Motors comes to mind.

If the accounting and mathematics were true - and they were - and if the policy makers were not totally incompetent - and the jury is still out on that one - some of these problems should have been addressed.
They were not.
We lived on in our eternal expectation that there is a Free Lunch, and we are the recipients!

Same thing holds true for the warnings today about various other matters: early warnings, inability to comprehend, inability to act.

The Deniers of today become the I-told-you-so-ers of tomorrow.

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