It wasn’t crab cakes and calamari delivered via room service to his tony penthouse paid for by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) “secretive nonprofit foundation,” but Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s so-called emergency manager overseeing the city’s bankruptcy, turned down an offer of a free lunch.

Maybe he doesn’t have the taste for a down-home chili dog, but it’s more likely he didn’t have the stomach or backbone to dine with the retired city workers who invited him to lunch Monday. The retirees who, Orr has said, face “significant cuts” to pensions.

In a humorous treatment of a serious subject, AFSCME is using GIFs—those ubiquitous, short animated photos—to tell the story of Detroit’s bankruptcy.

Detroit, Labor Day and a Hard Day’s Night was originally published on The Hill's Congress Blog. 

The Beatles first visited Detroit just before Labor Day in 1964, and they gushed with admiration for the Motown sound. Detroit hummed with industry then, like the Beatle’s own Liverpool, England, with its bustling ports and pop music scene. Both industrial cities would soon flounder, losing 40 percent of their populations over the next 30 years.

Several unions representing Detroit city works and retirees challenged Detroit’s claim for bankruptcy protection. The challenges were filed Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit, the court which will determine if the city is eligible for bankruptcy protection. AFSCME Council 25 said the city has not proven it is insolvent and has not negotiated in good faith with its creditors.

UAW President Bob King tells In These Times’ Molly M. Ginty:

If we restructure the city just like we restructured the auto industry, there’s hope that Detroit, too, can see a turnaround.

Detroit’s bankruptcy filing “must not be used as a tool to impoverish city of Detroit workers or retirees,” says the AFL-CIO Executive Council, in a statement from its July meeting.

City workers already have made severe concessions to keep the city afloat. They are not to blame for Detroit’s financial problems, yet they have been making sacrifices all along the way to help the city out….The AFL-CIO will continue to support our city of Detroit active and retired members in their fight to maintain dignity on the job, a safe workplace, fair wages and benefits for their labor, and against cuts in the pensions they have paid for and earned.

Before Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and his hand-picked emergency manager Kevyn D. Orr rushed the city’s bankruptcy filing to federal court last week, they refused to sit down and discuss the future of the city’s workers and retirees, AFSCME President Lee Saunders said this morning on "The Bill Press Show." He told Press:

They have not sat down and talked with the union at all in Detroit. They have refused to do so, to talk about how these issued can be resolved. They have said they’ve attempted to have these kinds of discussions. That is a bold-faced lie.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) authorized a bankruptcy filing yesterday for the city of Detroit based on recommendations from financial manager Kevyn Orr, making it the largest city in the United States to ever take that step. AFSCME members and other public-sector workers were not consulted for input before the filing. 

Fast food workers at more than 60 restaurants in Detroit walked off the job Friday. This may be the largest fast food strike in American history, involving more than 400 workers from McDonald's, Long John Silver's, Burger King, Popeyes and KFC. Some locations were forced to shut down. At issue is workers' right to form a union and an increase in base pay to a minimum of $15 per hour.

Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency is built on the idea that his success in the leveraged buyout industry and the fabulous wealth he’s accumulated is evidence that he knows how to create jobs and foster economic growth. He argued in Tuesday night’s debate that we should just trust him when he says he can cut the deficit and cut taxes by 20% across the board because of his credentials as a leveraged buyout titan.

The problem with Romney’s argument is that the leveraged buyout business does not create jobs. The tax breaks that the industry relies on, like the discounted tax rate for capital gains and offshore tax shelters, add tens of billions of dollars each year to the deficit.

Today, The Nation is reporting on yet another example of how Romney and the shadowy private investment industry really makes its money—offshoring jobs, taxpayer subsidies and bailouts and cutting workers’ pensions.