Detroit Goes Down

Detroit's bankruptcy filing has been more dramatic than most. Usually you trundle sadly down to the courthouse, staggering under the weight of the paper you're giving the court, a clerk takes your paperwork, and the wheels grind slowly through the process of fairly dividing up your assets and payments among your various creditors. But in Detroit's case, the unions have been trying to stop the process, apparently in the hope that if Detroit can't declare bankruptcy, someone else will have to step in and pay their pensions. They went to court this past summer to block the bankruptcy, only to be foiled when the city came into court and said it had just filed a few minutes before ... and were themselves in turn foiled by Circuit Court Judge Rosemary Aquilina, who threw the case back out and delivered an amazing speech:

The drama is now at an end: A federal judge just ruled that Detroit can indeed declare bankruptcy, shedding some of its unsustainable pension obligations. This will be the largest public bankruptcy in history.