First, there's nothing in Chapter 9 that enables creditors to force an asset sale. Instead, the only real leverage they have is the requirement that a plan be in their "best interests," but it is far from clear that necessitates a sale of the art, not least because the funds are not necessarily going to the GO bondholders.  (Remember that Chapter 9 "best interests" is not the same as Chapter 11 "best interests" because there is no Chapter 7 liquidation baseline for comparison in Chapter 9).

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Bankruptcy law has no provision that requires cities to sell their assets to satisfy creditors.....Cities, unlike businesses, cannot be liquidated.  Furthermore, bankruptcy courts are prohibited from ordering municipal tax increases. All the more so, they cannot force the liquidation of municipal assets.

Indeed, bankruptcy law does not distinguish among municipal assets, all of which are shielded from forced liquidation, just as cities are shielded from involuntary bankruptcy filings. Creditors can no more force the liquidation of Detroit's art collection than they can its playgrounds, fire stations or historic monuments.

j/k...that's my nephew's special lady going on 4 years now.  She sent out an APB to garner her votes...she wants this calendar slot bad.

When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy:  that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret End Game was Larry Summers.  Today, Summers is Barack Obama's leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world's central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn't be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

The memo is authentic.

To get that confirmation, I would have to fly to Geneva and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy. I did.

Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing "due process rights" as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.

The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.

"I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract," Sopko said.

I would be interested in what you have to say.