Certain political beliefs are treated as interchangeable with child abuse

My Friday evening movie, my second of the Freep Film Fest, was Gradually, Then Suddenly, about Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy. I streamed it from home. As I watched I took a page of notes. Here’s the basics of the story. Back in 2013-14 I wrote about the bankruptcy as it happened, perhaps a dozen posts. I also wrote about it in 2018 after seeing the Freep Film Fest movie Beauty and Ruin about the history of the Detroit Institute of Arts and how it got caught up in the bankruptcy proceedings. This movie focuses on why the bankruptcy happened and the issues around it resolution. Leading up to 2013 Detroit was $18.5 billion in debt. This was the largest city bankruptcy. All city services had been cut back due to a lack of money. Many street lights were out. There were huge numbers of arsons and homicides. Bus service was sporadic. If one called the police it might be an hour before they arrived – if they came at all. The city and its residents were in bad shape. Detroit and Michigan are highly racist. They’re not as bad as the South – here black people can vote – but there is still a lot of oppression. In the 1950 census the Detroit population was 1.8 million. At the time of the bankruptcy it was about 0.7 million. Freeways that were built in the late 1950s made white flight easier. Over the decades the middle class black people fled as well. That meant a great deal of the Detroit population was poor. The tax base dropped. And the city government budget took a big hit. There was also an adversarial relationship between Detroit and the state legislature. There is a law that says the state is to share revenue with cities with declining population to prevent them from spiraling into decline. But the state was increasingly reluctant to approve all of that money. Yes, that’s racism. Detroit’s first black mayor was elected in 1973. Part of the bad relationship was because white people in Lansing were annoyed with the audacity that black people wanted to govern themselves, so reduced payments to Detroit and other black majority cities. In a way that was to show black people couldn’t govern themselves. For a good long time Detroit was essentially a one industry town. The Detroit Three automakers employed a large part of the city’s (and region’s) population. But they tended to squabble amongst themselves for market share while ignoring the gains Toyota and other foreign brands were making. The Detroit Three had to cut costs and shrink their workforces. The Great Recession sent GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy in 2009. (Chrysler had several partners and name changes over the years and I don’t remember which name it held in 2009.) The woes of the auto industry made Detroit’s problems worse. By 2008 Detroit was pretty much out of money. The city fell way behind in making pension fund payments. The mortgage crisis that brought on the Great Recession hit Detroit especially hard. And the problems were made much worse. Detroit wasn’t the only Michigan city with a financial mess. The legislature came up with an Emergency Manager law, which swept aside the democratically elected city government and put in someone with sweeping powers to tear up existing labor contracts. Essentially a dictator. Yeah, the state refused to keep up the revenue sharing and when, because of that, the city couldn’t keep up the state took it over. In 2012 Michigan residents gathered enough signatures to put overturning the EM law on the ballot. The proposal won – and the lame-duck legislature promptly reinstated something very similar with a provision that prevented citizens from overturning it. The EM law was passed because city governments could not balance the books. Sheila Cockerel, who was on the Detroit City Council, said that was true. They were too beholden to political supporters. They spent too much, promised too much, and borrowed too much (though see above about the state withholding payment). I think it was sometime between 2008 and 2012 the city, in a desperate move, did some sort of pension bond swap. The essentially bet that the bond market would move in one direction. And it moved in the other. They lost their bet. Part of this is amazing – Detroit obviously was in debt and didn’t have enough money coming in to cover expenses – and yet institutions were still willing to lend it money with no obvious way for it to be paid back. In one of my previous posts I wondered (based on various presentations I had attended at the time) if those institutions could be convicted of fraud for misrepresenting the deal. Alas, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t pursued. This makes me think the institutions were working towards a scheme to suck money out of black people to give it to white people – which is what happened. Perhaps to them it was worth several million (or billion) to make the black people of Detroit even more impoverished. It’s a supremacist thing. The city owed money to two primary groups, the financial institutions and the retired city workers on pension. Even though the state constitution said pensions were sacrosanct, it also said they were contracted. And courts said that contracts could be voided, which meant pensions could be cut. That put the pensioners, mostly black and for whom the loss of a pension could mean life or death, up against big bankers, who were rich, mostly white, and for whom the loss of a few millions, maybe billions, wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference in their solvency and way of life. The conflict between pensioner and bank came down to the debt owed to the banks was secured and the money owed to pensioners was unsecured. And law puts secured debt first. This also annoys me because the banks – the financial institutions – knew the bet was risky. And they knew their money would be valued as more important than human lives. The story turned to the city’s assets. There were only two worth enough to matter. One was the water system. Detroit owned it, though it served the entire metro region and beyond. It also needed a great deal of repair and upgrading. The only way to pay for improvements was to raise rates and many Detroiters already had problems paying their water bill. It wouldn’t help pay the banks. However, the bankruptcy resulted in more regional representation on the water department’s board. The other big asset was the Detroit Institute of Arts. Yes, owned by the city. It’s collection was assembled at a time when Detroit had a lot of cash. Even though museums follow a code of not selling their art because it could end up in private collections and removed from public view, the pressure was on and appraisers came for a look. Soon the way out of bankruptcy was framed as pensioners v. art. Of course, many pensioners said sell the art. But as the earlier movie about the DIA stated, the money from the sale of the art would have not gone to the pensioners, it would have gone to the banks. Some people rightly framed the conflict between pensioners and the banks, but it wasn’t the usual view. A Grand Bargain began to shape up. Community foundations were urged to “buy” the DIA and its art, though the value they contributed was far from the value of the collection. Once that was mostly in place the city went to Lansing and pressured the legislature for a match. One of the arguments was this deal would be less than what the state would pay out in supplemental assistance to help all of those who become impoverished. There was a lot of resistance, but the money was approved. Then attention turned to the pensioners. Though the city was being run by an unelected administrator the pensioners voted on whether to accept their part of the deal. They were told their pensions would be cut and they would lose health insurance, but this is the deal we have and if you reject it any future deal will be worse for you. They approved it. And the deal was done. As for the investors, some got a quarter of what they were owed, others got a tenth. Thankfully, the deal included enough money for the city to restore and upgrade services. The city’s downtown and midtown areas are thriving, though many neighborhoods have seen little improvement. And the city’s finances are stable. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the library board of Enid, Oklahoma has created a policy of not making exhibits about sex, sexual perversion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and several other categories related to sex. For now, the books can stay on the shelves, but they can’t be highlighted. That has meant the cancellation of two programs. One is the Shameless Romance book discussion club. The other is Sexual Assault Awareness, which sounds important. Displays for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day might be canceled. The language the library adopted is directly from a bill introduced in the Oklahoma legislature that is currently stalled. I’ve written that the library in Llano County, Texas has pulled books from shelves. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported several citizens filed a lawsuit against several county commissioners, the library system director, some library board members, and a county judge.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs tried to check out several books that had been removed from the system and were denied access to those texts. They believe their constitutional rights have been violated because public officials censored the books based on their content. They also believe the public officials did not give proper notice or opportunity for the community to comment on the decision. “When government actors target public library books because they disagree with and intend to suppress the ideas contained therein,” the lawsuit states in part. “It jeopardizes the freedoms of everyone.” Rather brilliantly, the suit also points out public libraries are not places of government “indoctrination” where people in power can “spoon-feed one-sided information” and dictate what people are allowed to read and discover.

I had mentioned Florida is including math books in its list of books to be banned. Higgins explained a bit more.

We now have a few examples from math textbooks that allegedly include references to CRT and social-emotional learning (SEL), as reported by CNN. Social-emotional learning, as some background, helps students learn how to solve problems and make decisions while managing their emotions and using empathy. Sadly, it’s easy to see why conservatives would want to stomp this sort of learning out—imagine if their minions developed a hint of empathy for the marginalized people they love to hate? Suddenly they’d have to work a lot harder to get votes. In a more advanced application, social-emotional learning is valuable for adults, too, when it comes to us understanding how and why we engage with others (as well as ourselves) in various situations at home, work, or with friends. For white people like myself, for example, this could mean an opportunity to identify and take accountability for microaggressions or racial bias. ... One example shared by the Times includes a word problem where, in addition to the obvious math, students are able to learn how to support a friend who is scared about crossing a bridge in the jungle. Students learn that they can help the hypothetical friend by building up their confidence and supporting them, which is probably why conservatives are upset about it. ... Ah, yes, because nothing distracts from learning like … developing basic social skills, compassion, and real-world problem-solving. Guess kids should go back to copying multiplication tables on the blackboard and call it a day?

Clawson discussed what Christopher Rufo has been up to. He’s the guy who laid out the plans for the GOP to turn Critical Race Theory into a battle cry. His latest efforts are to turn “grooming” into a toxic accusation against Disney (for opposing Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law) and anyone else he can figure out how to tar it with. And, like a Bond villain, he likes to explain what he’s doing. For his efforts he got a nice puff piece at the New York Times.

But as [Don] Moynihan, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote at his Substack, it goes deeper. In Rufo’s usage, “this language is largely not about sexual abuse of children. Rufo is much more likely to describe ‘grooming’ in the context of kids being exposed to ideas he dislikes rather than actual sexual abuse. In other words, sharing certain political beliefs — usually centered around recognizing the status of historically marginalized groups — are treated as interchangeable with child abuse, its perpetrators akin to child abusers.” “The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues,” Rufo told the Times. In translation: He thinks he can ride anti-LGBTQ bigotry even further than racism. ... Rufo is part of a broader Republican movement to end public education, something he’s strategically laying the groundwork for with each new campaign he wages. CRT, grooming, social-emotional learning—all of these are buzzwords intended to weaken support for public education. Disney came into it because of the company’s opposition to the Florida Don’t Say Gay law banning the teaching of anything that might imply to children that LGBTQ people are acceptable members of their communities. Rufo laid out his approach in an April speech at Hillsdale College, titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” In it, he called for a “narrative and symbolic war against companies like Disney” in which “You have to be very aggressive. You have to fight on terms that you define.” On schools, he was explicit: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

Prairie Pilot of the Kos community proposed ways to diffuse the challenge that someone is a “groomer.” One could respond with sentences such as:

I want to groom the children of our country to build on this nation’s promises of equality and justice.

Some of the commenter are worried this will backfire. The word may already be too poisoned with its association with anti-LGBT hatred. Smiff added:

I worry that the R’s will just spam ads out of clips of Dems saying “I want to groom our children…” and say “See? I told you so...”

Chepe added an alternate use:

I’ve started talking about “Christian groomers” trying to inculcate hatred, ignorance, and denial of reality into unsuspecting children.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s a bit of it:

If you think Florida is overreacting now, just wait until they find out that math can be non-binary. —Trevor Noah

When Disney began to build Disney World in Florida, all those decades ago they worked out with the state what is known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Over the land it owned (and it looks like over some of the surrounding neighborhoods) Disney is its own local government. It provides its own fire service and sewer treatment. In exchange Disney does not pay local property taxes. Because Disney is now working against a favorite Republican project, that Don’t Say Gay law, there is now an effort to overturn that Reedy Creek agreement. Hunter of Kos reported that Disney isn’t worried. State law says the District cannot be dissolved if there are outstanding bond debts – and there are, about a $1 billion worth. So the state, or maybe Orange County, would have to take over that debt – causing a steep rise in local taxes. That would be a big financial gift to Disney. Another barrier is the county would also have to pay for fire and sewer service. This “retaliation” looks pretty good from Disney’s point of view.