As the hostage crisis drags on in Washington, and we get closer and closer to default on the national debt, there’s a new story today that’s perhaps more disturbing. The Obama administration has intervened in the Detroit bankruptcy proceeding, and not on behalf of workers or middle-class Detroit citizens, who overwhelmingly oppose the bankruptcy and the dictatorship of sometime Obama apparatchik, Kevyn Orr, who is reprising his role in the sack of the US Auto Industry as he directs the use of the courts “to gut the benefits of public employees and sell off public assets.” No, the Obama administration has intervened on behalf of capital. Jerry White puts it this way at the World Socialist Web Site.

The Obama administration, speaking on behalf of Wall Street, sees the measures being taken in Detroit as a model. Just as the government-backed restructuring of the auto industry in 2009—in which Orr played a significant role—was the opening shot in an attack on wages and benefits throughout the country, the bankruptcy of Detroit will set the precedent for destroying city workers’ pensions and health care.

Banks and other investment firms who “swindled the city out of hundreds of millions in credit default swaps” will of course be paid first as the bankruptcy proceeds. Workers and retirees, who have been abandoned by their unions, will lose most. The Bankruptcy will rob “the city’s 19,000 retirees and their dependents of as much as 90 percent of their pension benefits” and dump them willy-nilly into the new health insurance exchanges. Some workers have already lost jobs as the public services of which they were part have been privatized (and these include public schools). A once proud city will lose the last vestige of its integrity and much of its cultural capital as Orr sells off the contents of its “world famous Detroit Institute of Arts,” having already lost its ability to govern itself. It may be the most profoundly un-American thing I have witnessed in my seventy-six years.

The back story is well known. The state of Michigan overturned the law enabling the unelected emergency manager, but the will of the people was thwarted by a last minute deal to reinstate the law by a venal state government, backed by Detroit’s mayor. Now Detroit is ruled by a dictator, who when he took the job announced that he was “prepared to be the most hated man for a period of time.” And the situation in Detroit presages something still more ominous. We are hearing from Washington of the possible willingness of the Obama administration to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. And the news today that COLAs next January will amount to only 1.5 percent does nothing to allay the dismay of retirees like me. Public workers, retirees, and public life are under attack everywhere. If the Obama administration sells us out again, and this brief in the Detroit bankruptcy case looks very much like a sellout, I and a good many other progressives may have to look for a political home outside the Democratic Party.

But this action in the Detroit case is less a betrayal of me and my generation than it is of Generation X and the Millennials, those younger Americans who have supported the Obama presidency in numbers, perhaps even while they participated in the occupy movement. It isn’t just Detroit’s public workers and retirees who are being sold out; it is the hopes and dreams of millions of young Americans who didn’t exactly think Social Security would be there for them, but hoped it might—and who, as they chanted “Yes, we can!” with the rest of us, almost came to believe they could.