Are you in the market for a firehouse, a library or even a city hall? It seems that Pontiac is holding the mother of all "Going Out of Business" sales. Everything must go, says Emergency Manager Louis Schimmel.

Welcome to Crisis Capitalism. This may be an old game, but Detroit is the first major American city where the new template will be test driven: fiscal crisis, suspension of democracy, followed by the rapid, wholesale dismantling of the public sector and privatization of the commons.

As documented by John Perkins in his best selling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, debt has been used around the world for decades to create economic opportunity for the 1%. A former "hit man" himself, Perkins describes the years he spent weaving financial webs which would ensnarl heads of state.

A hit man's job, he says, is to compel (charm, bribe, extort) government leaders of resource rich or otherwise strategic countries to take on loans with terms that they could never meet. When the bill comes due and default looms, austerity, mass privatization and political favors are imposed by those holding the notes. It is simply the use of debt as a weapon to gain control over a nation's business, political and trade policies. It has proven an effective means to expand free trade around the globe and grow corporate profits.

In that globalized world, Europe is far closer to Detroit than you might suppose. The European Central Bank with the help of the IMF and the Federal Reserve Bank have stepped in to address a rolling banking and sovereign debt default crisis on that continent. The solutions they are implementing should sound familiar: bank bailouts, austerity for the citizens, privatization of public assets--all overseen in a hurry by technocrats who have replaced elected heads of state amidst an atmosphere of fear and crisis.

Even closer to home, the Federal Reserve's massive real estate bubble, coupled with radical deregulation, enabled banks to engage in the widespread practice of writing predatory and often fraudulent loans to people they knew would be unable to meet the terms. Next came the bust, with waves of foreclosures sweeping across communities resulting in high unemployment and devastated local property tax bases.

At the same time trillions (with a T) of public funds were diverted from states and cities to bail out banks, bonus their CEO's and protect their stockholders. As the money flowed to Citibank and Goldman Sachs (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan), we were told the nation is broke and there is nothing left for social security, medicaid, food stamps and unemployment insurance.

So far Republicans and the Tea Party have been successful in directing the inevitable blowback into inter-class warfare: working class vs working class--those who have fallen out of the middle class pitted against those hanging on for dear life. The good news is that the Occupy movement has been able to substantially reframe the conversation in a single season of truth telling.

A neat bookend for Perkins story is Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, an impeccably researched study detailing the long standing policy, emerging out of economist Milton Friedman's Chicago School of free market extremism, that she calls Disaster Capitalism.

According to Klein, the violent overthrow of democratically elected governments has historically been one sort of crisis where an economic "shock" can be administered while the citizens are otherwise occupied. The breach of the levees of New Orleans during Katrina is a second. Katrina, was significant because the "shock" was administered to an American city. Says Klein of the New Orleans experience and what is happening in Michigan and Wisconsin:

 What we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation…

A company takes over. So, they have created the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not?

The mayor appears to be onboard:

 Privatization, outsourcing has always been a dirty word. But we’re talking about survival. And we can’t allow our 11,000 employees that we have to dictate the future of over 700,000 people here in this city.

The means, of course, will be Public Act 4, with trial-runs well under way in Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Pontiac and the Detroit Public School System. Now Detroit: the shock doctrine is coming home.

No matter what series of events deliver you into the jaws of crisis, Disaster Capitalism's menu remains the same: Mass terminations of public employees, the destruction of collective bargaining, the raiding of pensions, the gutting of health care and elimination of other so-called legacy costs. The stage is then set for the privatization of public services such as police, firefighting, public education and the sale of municipal assets--water systems, sewage systems, city owned buildings and land to private corporations.

In a frenzy of cronyism that would likely embarrass the small time hustle of the former Kilpatrick administration, many of the most valuable public assets of the region that happen to be located in Detroit could be handed over for pennies on the dollar to business interests eager to play ball with the Snyder administration. With an emergency manager in control, there will be no transparency, public input or accountability. It's the law.

Those who are organizing opposition around racial issues are only getting it partly right. Yes, the first American cities to have the fiscal template run on them are overwhelmingly African American. This is primarily because these black communities are at the tip of an expanding national fiscal crisis and are least able to politically defend themselves. This is also made possible because the majority of white Michigan residents have little sympathy toward these cities and think, to put it mildly, a good housecleaning will do them some good. As their frustration and desperation boils over, a growing number of Detroit residents have come to the same conclusion.

But there should be no mistake: this is not primarily about race. This is about the successful launch of what will be a wave of fiscal "emergencies" that will lead to dozens of other cities, maybe hundreds, being "shocked" into privatization. This is the cutting edge of an organized seizure of publicly owned wealth. We are entering a bull market in crisis.

The Snyder administration is telling Bing to "Fix finances or face manager." The mayor is trying to play both sides, first suggesting he would serve if appointed, then using the threat of the takeover to his bargaining advantage, then reversing course as he senses deep unease within his constituency.

There is not enough austerity, no amount of layoffs, not enough tax increases, to dig the city out of this crisis. Could the city find enough cuts right now to keep its head above water? Maybe, but the fix would be temporary, only to find itself back in this place in a matter of months, with even fewer options.

The city has hit the financial wall. Regardless of the causes, and there are many, this is not a contrived crisis.The immediate choices we face are increased corporate control via privatization that undermines democracy, or a reset of community control, anchored by a more just revenue base and a plan for growth and revitalization. Yes, the elected leadership of Detroit has repeatedly failed its residents. The solution to this problem is to hold an election, not to loot the community's collective legacy.

Cuts, austerity and the sale of public assets alone can only lead to a dead end. Any viable approach to Detroit's current crisis is going to need to include far more: 1) haircuts and restructuring for those holding municipal debt 2) state, federal and private funding committed to a regional economic development plan with Detroit at its core, and 3) fresh elected leadership in the city.

When I moved back to Detroit about a year ago I did so because I believed that this city, for a number of unique reasons, could prove to be a testing ground for things to come. A place where solutions from the grassroots could potentially point the way to innovative approaches to other city's challenges which are behind Detroit's arc of abandonment, divestment and disintegration.

My hope was (and still remains) that with enough imagination, hard work and some luck we would be able to do some urban agenda setting from the bottom up.

It now appears as though the eyes of the nation will indeed be fixed upon Detroit. Unfortunately, our city may be used as a test case for false solutions imposed from the top down. Solutions that can then be dictated, as opportunity permits, across the country. Given that the current economic crisis is far from over, it is an opportunity that is sure to come.