The Corrupt Bargain: Detroit’s bankruptcy, a rogues’ gallery.

The National Review reports:

Syncora, which, as the insurer, inherited a great deal of the financial liability, argues that it is being treated unfairly, and that the city’s pennies-on-the-dollar offer to financial creditors — while imposing only trivial reductions on the pensioners whose benefits are at the root of the problem — is unfair. It argues that the so-called grand bargain under which the state of Michigan and several foundations will offer the city about $800 million in exchange for its vaunted art collection grossly undervalues the art — which is estimated to be worth billions, not millions — deprives creditors of an asset that might be used to make them whole. The city argues that the pensioners can’t be blamed — all they did was take the money — and that city council can’t be blamed, arguing in effect that its members are too stupid to have understood what they were doing. The pinstripes set isn’t looking very good, either: Syncora has warned investors that it doesn’t have enough in its reserves to pay all the claims, should things not go its way.

So we have: a city council too short-sighted and beef-witted to understand what it was doing, a mayor who was an outright criminal, union bosses who never asked where the money was going to come from and union members who simply cashed the checks and never held their leaders to account, banks and financial firms that were happy to bet that they’d be comfortably seated when the music stopped, and lawyers and a court system happy to ignore the fact that the bankruptcy deals being worked out in Detroit are exactly as corrupt and destructive as the policies that put the city into bankruptcy in the first place. And a pox on the people of Detroit, too: They keep voting for this, over and over.

It's not like we didn't warn you years ago.