“There’s a Detroit where private security firms patrol wealthy neighborhoods, and there’s a Detroit where children have to shower at school because the water has been shut off in their neighborhood. They aren’t the same Detroit anymore, and Laura Gottesdiener profiles the gap between in her TomDispatch article Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal: A Journey Across a City Divided.
Laura explains how the auto industry bailout, mortgage crisis (and years of similar economic policies) propped up corporations and governments at the expense of workers and citizens, what technocrats willingly ignore when they treat an entire city like an experiment in neoliberal economics, and why the work of citizen-based groups like the People’s Water Board and Michigan Welfare Rights Organization give her hope that a city can be saved by its own people. Laura Gottesdiener is a journalist and an associate editor for Waging Nonviolence.”