Detroit. The filing for bankruptcy is a sad, but, in a way, predictable event — if one is willing to see what this really means. It’s a deep metaphor for the failure of the so-called “free market”.

The finality of a legal bankruptcy filing obscures the reality that what has happened to Detroit has happened all across the country — and, in similar ways, across the globe.

We’ve let the so-called “free market” shape the way we think of what it means to have a decent society.

It’s not decent wages or pensions that brought about a financial crisis to this city, and hundreds of other cities.

It is a disastrous so-called “free trade” policy, embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. “Free trade” wasn’t the only tool big corporations used to destroy Detroit and other cities. But, it gave policy legitimacy — and, for sure, real incentives — to bludgeon millions of workers. So, duh, wages went down, people could not afford to buy shit, they didn’t earn enough money so tax receipts, as a whole, went down…and cities had less money.

But, that wouldn’t be the worse hit to municipal treasuries. Nope. That would be the tax cut mania that basically started in the 1980s. There was never a tax cut for business or for upper income people that a Republican or Democrat met that they didn’t embrace for the sake of the so-called “free market”. Despite there being NO SERIOUS EVIDENCE– NONE, ZERO, NADA — that the tax cuts helped “spur” economic “growth”, those cuts kept coming. Which emptied municipal treasuries everywhere — and put a heavier burden on those regular people to carry the load of decent services.

And when it came to health care, my god, this president, and the person he defeated in the primaries (who is now rising, Pheonix-like, because people believe she is “ready to lead”), left in place two of the most corrupt industries humankind has every known: the drug and insurance industries. Just those costs alone — profits lining the pockets of a few companies and CEOs — saddled every community with immoral costs.

And, then, we let the fucking bankers and Wall Street destroy the base of economic sustainability. I’m not just talking about the most recent global financial crisis. No, this is a history of 30-40 years. You know, the good old years of Wall Street? When Democrats and Republicans encouraged Wall Street-led leveraged buyouts and corporate “efficiency” for the sake of an entirely phony “growth”…which only happened for a few, but, in the process, hollowed out companies and communities.

And, by the way, when they cratered the economy, where do you think the big losses hit, besides people losing their jobs and homes? Pension funds. Money workers put aside — deferred wages — for retirement. Those funds lost tens of billions of dollars — money never to be recovered. But, the CEOs of those companies? No problem: they kept their tens of millions of dollars in pay, benefits and RETIREMENT, and their jobs. What a scam.

And, then, when they all fucked up — when bankers, CEOs, and the entire lot of the financial elite — repeatedly crashed the economy, from the savings and loan debacle right through to the recent financial casino that obliterated trillions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs, did they go to jail? Did they lose their jobs? Did Republicans or Democrats say, “oh, shit, this isn’t working, the system is corrupt”? Of course not.

And, you could, then, go through the entire story we know about the corruption of American politics, where this president and every president before him has financed their rise to power on the back of a torrent of cash that basically meant they would keep in place the very system that has led to the bankruptcy filing in Detroit.

Now, you will never read this from the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) because they cannot see, or won’t speak about the bankruptcy of the system. For example:

Instead, numerous factors over many years have brought Detroit to this point, including a shrunken tax base but still a huge, 139-square-mile city to maintain; overwhelming health care and pension costs; repeated efforts to manage mounting debts with still more borrowing; annual deficits in the city’s operating budget since 2008; and city services crippled by aged computer systems, poor record-keeping and widespread dysfunction.

All of that makes bankruptcy — a process that could take months, if not years, and is itself expected to be costly — particularly complex.

“It’s not enough to say, let’s reduce debt,” said James E. Spiotto, an expert in municipal bankruptcy at the law firm of Chapman and Cutler in Chicago. “At the end of the day, you need a real recovery plan. Otherwise you’re just going to repeat the whole thing over again.”

You read that and there is no guilty party named from the very people who have engineered the system. How did this “shrunken tax base” happen? Oh, must be a natural phenomena, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. It’s criminal negligence on the part of the press. Shocking.

This isn’t even the whole history. But, let us not allow this calamity to strike the people of Detroit to be misread, or, more accurately, intentionally twisted, to blind us to the truth: this is about the corruption and failure of the so-called “Free market”.