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Press TV has conducted an interview with Dean Henderson, author and political commentator, Memphis about the bankrupt US city of Detroit that has now cut off water supply to tens of thousands of its citizens who have not paid their bills.

Press TV: We have our guest Michael Lane talking about Detroit known to mismanage itself, to be corrupt and it has dug its own grave. Does that give reason to what has occurred and the sick people who have been left without running water, without working toilets as we understand, people recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages; and some reports indicating the poorest have also been affected by these measures?

Henderson: Detroit is a perfect metaphor for what’s happening to this whole country. It used to be the cradle of our auto industry, which the United States built itself up upon and now of course the globalization and internationalization of this economy; this sort of slave labor camp called China… Basically we’ve run all the industry out of town and now we want to blame it on the black mayor, I guess.

Detroit is not the only city in this kind of trouble. Since Reagan we’ve gone through this stage of privatizing everything; there’s no state health for Detroit; there’s no federal funds for Detroit’s sewer and water system – all which they used to have; all of which every city in this country used to have because the Republican Congress has convinced everybody that they want everybody’s taxes to go down.

What actually happens is that local taxes go up, property taxes in Detroit are probably through the roof trying to pay for this stuff. And it just means the Rockefeller’s and the Rothschild’s don’t have to pay taxes and don’t have to help.

So, to blame this on mismanagement in Detroit, well, I’m sure there was, but the whole country is the same way – mismanagement and corruption.

And if we could spend 1.7 trillion dollar bombing the hell out of Iraq and 4,000 Americans dying, how come we can’t send a couple of billion dollars to just get this fixed?

And for that matter how come we can’t do a huge new deal, bigger than what FDR (former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) did and fix all these water systems, fix all these sewer systems, fix all our public schools, fix the bridges, fix the things that need fixing in this country. You go to Malaysia and the highways are better than they are here.
So it’s a symbol of a declining empire, a bunch of right wing politicians that don’t want to spend anything on the people they just want to spend it on the war machine, military industrial complex, big oil, big defense, big contractors and here we go again in Iraq. So… it’s just sad.

Press TV: The UN has said and I quote, “The disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights”.

Henderson: Yes, I guess that’s right and it’s pretty embarrassing that a big city in the United States goes to the UN rather than people from that city because they can’t get any recourse from their local or state or federal government, they have to go to the United Nations to try to bring this up…it’s just embarrassing.

Again it’s this crazy Friedrich Hayek Austrian School of Economics. I don’t know what it is in America it’s this streak of sort of mean streak that’s showing up, this sort of retribution.

Retribution towards the poor, retribution towards people who are not like us, retribution towards Iraq, retribution towards ourselves… we don’t even want to help ourselves. What is it with the American psyche now, we just got this mean streak, “Just cut them off and let them take care of themselves."

There is no commons in this country, there is no public anything anymore so… the only way you’re going to fix this is a huge new deal, a new government spending program.

Not a handout to the poor, we need to create jobs to get this country going again. Guess what, private sector is not hiring if you haven’t noticed.

So it’s an opportunity to create jobs in Detroit. If the federal government would just get off its Friedrich Hayek dogma, forget about that and use some common sense. Common sense would say let’s do a federal grant let’s create some jobs, let’s fix this thing by putting people to work.

Maybe we can dump one of the F-35 bombers of Lockheed Martin, which by the way got 952 billion dollars from the United States government over the past ten years in welfare.

Press TV: Our guest Michael Lane talks about a very alarming situation that the US economy is doing worse than expected based on the contraction that has taken place. It was announced to be one percent, but it was actually 2.9 percent - For all intents and purposes almost triple that, three percent.

This comes, when you look at it comparatively, it shows that this decline is the highest since the economy shrank five percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2009.

It seems like the US is not coming out of this supposed recovery, it may be sliding into recession right now; but the bigger picture based on some analysts seems to indicate that there’s a possibility – and I’m sure you’ve heard this – that the US may be heading for another financial crisis because it seems like this happens on a 5-7 year cycle.

Do you think the situation is that alarming in the US for this to actually happen? We’re seeing stats like today… very alarming indeed by some accounts.

Henderson: Yes I think we’re in a deflationary death spiral pretty much.

The only way that banksters can keep this going is by permanent war and that’s what they’re doing in Ukraine and that’s what they’re doing in Iraq. That’s all we’ve got; that’s all the United States makes anymore is weapons of war… and oil.

Did you notice oil prices went up 30 cents per gallon last week because of this ISIS flap in Iraq. So, Exxon Mobil is rolling in the dough; but if we don’t keep this permanent war economy going attempting to re-inflate the global economy…

Interest rates are at zero, there’s no place to go, so we’re in this deflationary death spiral. We learned this lesson in the 1930s we learned it in the 1890s – You have to inject government funding into these projects.

The other guest talks about Obama’s bad management, well… Obama can’t get anything done because the right wing Congress, the republicans won’t let him get anything done. They vote ‘no’ on everything, any kind of government spending.

We are so far out on the ‘right’ here in America it is like the Republicans are fascist and the Democrats are on the far right; there’s nobody on the left, there’s nobody helping out the people.

To help somebody out in Detroit, no God forbid, we won’t give them any money they might abuse it. Well they didn’t seem to care when they gave two trillion dollars to these contractors in Iraq and they threw that down the toilet – That was just fine, put a bumper sticker on your van, you know, but you’re not really helping anybody by doing that, so it’s phony.

We need to redirect this from overseas: to come home; defend our own borders; leave people alone so they don’t hate us anymore; maybe the price of oil goes down a little bit and we fix Detroit. And we fix everything… we put solar rail; we put solar panels on all the interstates.

We can do this America, we’re not as pathetic as these John Boehner-types in Congress wringing their hands and crying in their whiskey would have you think. So it’s time to get on our feet, time to do something for the people of this country.