Nearly a thousand Detroit residents packed the Greater Grace Temple on the city’s northwest side Tuesday night for the first of a series of public hearings on Mayor David Bing’s plans to restructure and shrink the city. The huge turnout clearly surprised the meeting organizers, and the mood of the crowd was generally critical, if not outright hostile, to the mayor’s plan, which he has entitled “The Detroit Works Project.”
Widespread opposition was sparked by reports that city services will be cut off in selected areas—those with large numbers of vacant or abandoned homes— in order to force residents to move. The land freed up by this process would be turned over to favored businessmen to exploit for residential, commercial or even agricultural purposes.
Even before people had finished streaming into the huge church, the meeting was divided up into 10 separate “breakout sessions...” The purpose of this elaborate pretense of consultation was to prevent any confrontation between city officials and residents angered by the downsizing proposals. No city official addressed the assembled crowd initially, and when the breakout sessions were announced, several people rose from their seats to oppose the procedure.
“We didn’t come here for a breakout session,” one woman said, to considerable applause. “You don’t want to listen to the people,” another shouted out. “This is not what we came here to do.”
Many of those attending decided to stay in the main hall rather than go to the breakout sessions as instructed. The meeting organizers responded by rolling out partition walls that divided the main hall from floor to ceiling, cutting up the crowd into smaller groups, each penned up and separated from the others, to prevent any collective discussion...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/detr-s16.shtml
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