A Lesson on Detroit For Ed Schultz & Melissa Harris-Perry

'Michigan used to be a symbol of industrial strength in manufacturing in this country. But thanks to a lot of Republican policies, the city is now filing for bankruptcy,.  Make no mistake, Detroit is exactly what the Republicans want.  They outsourced manufacturing jobs, attack unions, cut public services, and this is the result. Now they can wipe the slate clean because now they can start privatizing city assets.'

- Sergeant Ed Schultz

 MSNBC's Ed Schultz: Detroit bankruptcy the result of Republican policies???

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Stop it, yer killin’ me!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I think ALL of my ribs are broken! 

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

All HAHAHA aside, let's look at the facts Sergeant Schultz. 

First, give a listen to Walter Russell Mead:

Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The city’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised. Between 2007 and 2011, an astounding 36 percent of residents lived below the poverty line….

Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long. The truth is that corrupt machine politics in a one-party system devoted to the blue social model wrecked an entire city and thousands of lives beyond repair.

Now, how about we start by looking at the last 50 years of Detroit mayors (you'll notice that all mayors after 1974 have been African-American):

  

  Louis Miriani (R)

12 September 1957 – 2 January 1962

Jerome Cavanagh (D)

2 January 1962 – 5 January 1970

 Roman Gribbs (D)

6 January 1970 – 1 January 1974

Coleman Young (D)

1 January 1974 – 3 January 1994

 

Dennis Archer (D)

 1 January 1994 – 31 December 2001

 

Kwame Kilpatrick (D)

1 January 2002 – 18 September 2008

Kenneth Cockrel, Jr. (D)

18 September 2008 – 11 May 2009

 

 Mayor Dave Bing (D)

11 May 2009

Now, let's look at the members of the City Council, which has been majority black since 1977 and majority Democrat long before then.

James H Brickley (R)

1962 - Resigned 15 January 1967 to be Lt Governor.  He ended his career as a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court from 1982-1999/

  Louis Miriani (was R; ran as NP)

1964 - 1969

 

William G 'Billy' Rogell (D)

1947-1981

Mary Beck (D)

1950-1970; feminist, activist, first woman elected to DCC

 Emma Henderson (D)

1972 - 1989; first black woman elected to the Detroit City Council

 Carl M Levin (D)

1970-1979

 Jack Kelley (D)

1974-1993

 David Eberhard (D)

1970-1993 ; ran on a liberal slate with Carl Levin

 Kenneth Cockrel, Sr. (D)

1978-1981; married Sheila Cockrel

 

 John W Peeples (D)

1982-1989

  

 Maryann Mahaffey (D)

She served on the Detroit City Council from 1973 until 2005, from 1990 to 1998 and from 2001 to 2005 as council president. She was the last white female city council president of Detroit.

Keith Butler (R)

1990-1993

 

 Gil Hill (D)

1990-2001

 Clyde Cleveland (D)

1974-2001

Mel Ravitz (D)

1963-73; m 1982-1997

 Nicholas Hood III (D)

1994-2001, stepped down to run for mayor; lost to Bing

 

 Kay Everett (D)

1990-2005 (her death) (indicted, I believe)

Brenda M Scott (D)

1994-2002 (death)

Alberta Tinsley-Talabi (D)

1993-2006

 Sharon McPhail (D)

   

 2002 until 2006

Alonzo Bates (D)

2002-2005;  Hired and paid "ghost" employees and accepted free construction services in exchange for favorable voting on council; sentenced to 33 months.

Barbara-Rose Collins (D)

1982–1991, 1990-1996, 2005-2009

 Sheila Cockrel (D)

1993 - 2009; married Ken Cockrel Sr

 

 Monica Conyers (D)

19 September 2008 to 6 July 2009. On 26 June 2009, the wife of Congressman John  Conyers pleaded guilty.   Three days later, Conyers officially resigned from the Detroit City Council, effective July 6.

 

 Martha Reeves (D)

 2005 to 2009

 Kwame Kenyatta (D)

(Resigned June 21, 2013)
 

 

Gary Brown (D)

Elected in 2009; Served as the Council President Pro-Tem for the 2010-until his 24 June 2013 resignation.

Saunteel Jenkins (SEIU-D)

 Andre Spivey (D)

Kenneth Cockrel, Jr. (D)

 

Brenda Jones (D)

Charles Pugh (D) 

2009-2013 (removed for inappropriate behaviour

with underage boys)

 JoAnn Watson (D)

'Councilwoman Joann Watson, of Detroit, suggesting that since Detroit was stupid enough to vote for Obama again, he should now return the favor and bail the city out. It's as if Joann, and all of her idiotic like-minded liberal friends, think that Obama is going to simply write her a big check from the endlessly growing money tree he has on his unicorn farm, when he's not busying himself with golf or believing that he's the Messiah.'

(h/t Michael Snyder)

The following are 26 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head...

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities.  That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit.  Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city.  Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 "Superfund" hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

26) 8% of the Detroit population is white.  By 2020, the white population will make up at most 5%.

It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.

Detroit just got there first.

All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin...

"Everyone will say, 'Oh well, it's Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,' " said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. "But Detroit is not unique. It's the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It's a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems."

A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country.  When it didn't happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.

But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.

She was just early.

Detroit is only just the beginning.  When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.

And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government.  We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.

All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading.  We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.

We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is "normal", but an extremely painful "adjustment" is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.

So don't laugh at Detroit.  The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.

Afro-centric schools and African Business Enterprise Zones, which whites may not participate, are part of the problem.  If you want to create Mumbabwe here, get ready for Mumbabwe and quit blaming it on 'whitey,' 'globalism,' Republicans (reminder: the last Republican mayor was 51 years ago).

Blaming others, who had nothing to do with your predicament, will not affect the innocent, but will merely further leave you behind.

‘Detroit: A City on the Move’…into the Abyss

By Ed Driscoll

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh, with an assist from a passages written on the city in a 1990 book by Zev Chafets, documented how that period worked out:

Now, under Mayor Coleman Young, Detroit had an official nationalist doctrine that referred to the riots as the rebellion and the former white administrations that used to run the city as occupying powers.  That’s how he talked about them.  He was leading the rebellion of the city inside, you know, south of Eight Mile, and the occupying powers were outside the city.

Now, to make the point even clearer he erected a statue in honor of Joe Louis.  It was a giant black fist right at the freeway entrance to downtown Detroit.  A giant black fist in honor of Joe Louis right at the freeway entrance to downtown Detroit.  So it was clear that Coleman Young harbored hatred for the whites who had fled the city after the black riots.  Well, that hate was reciprocated.  The whites, who might have wanted to invest, or live in the city, decided not to.  They decided to stay out.  This caused downtown Detroit to become a ghost town, which, according to Chafets’ book, was fine with the mayor.

He built a political machine that kept himself in power for 20 years by fanning the fires of racial grievance and separatism.  Coleman Young told Zev Chafets that his role models were Boss Daley of Chicago, Boss Curley of Boston, Mayor Cavanaugh of Detroit, and other ethnic tribal leaders of the past.  And he was very open about it.  And all of these people that he admired had looted their cities on behalf of themselves and their political base and Coleman Young said now it was my turn, and that’s what he did in Detroit. [Oh, that punitive liberalism -- Ed.]

The 20 years of Colemanism, the 20 years that he was mayor were one long experiment in municipal black nationalism and ideological separatism.  And by the name of he left office, the city was a shambles.  He was followed by Dennis Archer and then Kwame Kilpatrick. Archer became a prisoner of the system.  Kwame Kilpatrick became a prisoner of the federal penal system.  They got him, it was multiple acts of corruption, but I forgot the details of what it was.  But it all happened.  I mean, this program was happening while all this was going on in Detroit.  And Kwame Kilpatrick and Dennis Archer, Coleman Young was their mentor. He was their role model.  It is said that even Dave Bing is part of the Coleman Young legacy.

So what you have, Detroit is a city with no tax base, no budget, no money, no services, no schools, hardly any employment, no viable political life, and it’s now ruled by a Republican governor, as is the result of the bankruptcy.

 


Related: 

 The Destruction of Detroit (Photo Essay)

A Lesson on Detroit For Ed Schultz & Melissa Harris-Perry

Detroit Was Destroyed By Communists

Smoldering Core of a Slighted City :' Devil's Night And Other True Tales Of Detroit' By Ze'ev Chafets

The Downfall of Detroit

http://tinyurl.com/mo4hahz