Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Detroit:
Detroit City Council:
h/t Shawn
71 Replies to “Detroit: Not Dead Enough”
dmorris: “The Detroiters will be okay planting their gardens,until some City bureaucrat decides it’s wrong” … or until the arrival of winter.
minuteman at January 7, 2012 12:52 PM: …Detroit no longer has a reason to exist. 50 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of auto related jobs in Detroit, now there are none…. When a cities economic reason for being disappears, the city will to. We tend to not think about Detroit like this because it was once such a big place, but it is a one industry town that lost its industry.
Pittsburgh, PA has survived the loss of its steel industry. There are certain fundamentals that mean that Detroit will never be the industrial center it once was, including the declining importance of European markets to American businesses. East Asia is becoming ever more important.
“Detroit no longer has a reason to exist.”
So where are they going to go? 47% illiteracy rate!
Remember when all the “disenfranchised youth” fled to Houston after Katrina? Houston’s crime rate which was already substantial went up 20% overnight.
Let’s face it; Detroit is a Liberalized Ghetto prison of sorts now. The State pumps the money in to sustain the welfare checks and artificially keep the bulk of “prisoners” corralled in one place. As best they can.
The most amazing thing to watch is every other Liberalized country and state going down the same road. They are even importing extra illiterate dependants from the Third World in bulk.
With the open border policies, you can only conclude that this societal destruction is by design. No one could be so stupid, yet there we have it.
“What was observed in Minneapolis was not looting. Rather, it was an instance of ebonomics in action, or ebony economics, a kind of socialism focused on redistribution of material goods to melanistic citizens so that they may enjoy a quality of life approaching a for now poorly defined ideal level. How can one impose a curfew on an economic system? It makes as much sense as imposing a curfew on capitalism. Note how well ebonomics serves those free to participate in the system, such as was the case in NOLA following the Katrina disaster.”
A related quote I like that explains the situation well.
Private sector unions do this eventually to virtually every business/industry. The Automakers would have been crazy to retool in Detroit when they could relocate in a right to work state. The same thugs that ran these unions are now entrenched in Democratic politics throughout the nation and particularly this administration.
It would be much easier to allow the ruins to revert to forest than revive the city given the depraved culture. As for that council meeting, that was tame. People might be surprised (not pleasantly either) to find as bad or worse behavior in their own local government chambers.
Stansberry: Detroit’s socialist nightmare is America’s future
Thursday, October 29, 2009
From Porter Stansberry in the S&A Digest:
One of the most important things to remember about socialism – or coercion of any kind – is it fails eventually because human beings have an innate desire for liberty and a strong need for personal property rights. In fact, the origins of government lie in the need of agricultural communities to protect themselves from violence and theft. So it is particularly ironic that in more recent times, it is government itself that has more frequently played the role of bandit. When you start taxing people at extreme rates to pay for socialist “benefits,” when you start telling them which schools their children must attend, when you start giving jobs away to people based on race instead of ability… you quash human freedom, which bogs down productivity… and if continued for long enough, leads to social collapse.
I find it perplexing that only 20 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the West continues to implement laws that mimic all of the failed policies of our former “communist” foes. In fact, our current president won the election by promising to “spread the wealth around.” But… truth be told… we don’t have to look to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to find a society destroyed by coercion, socialism, and the overreaching power of the State. We could just look at Detroit…
In 1961, the last Republican mayor of Detroit lost his re-election bid to a young, intelligent Democrat, with the overwhelming support of newly organized black voters. His name was Jerome Cavanagh. The incumbent was widely considered to be corrupt (and later served 10 years in prison for tax evasion). Cavanagh, a white man, pandered to poor underclass black voters. He marched with Martin Luther King down the streets of Detroit in 1963. (Of course, marching with King was the right thing to do… It’s just Cavanagh’s motives were political not moral.) He instated aggressive affirmative action policies at City Hall. And most critically, he greatly expanded the role of the government in Detroit, taking advantage of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Model Cities Program” – the first great experiment in centralized urban planning.
Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson’s task force. And Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which attempted to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a “model city.” More than $400 million was spent trying to turn inner cities into shining new monuments to government planning. In short, the feds and Democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open or close. In return, the people received cash, training, education, and health care.
The Model Cities program was a disaster for Detroit. But it did accomplish its real goal: The creation of a state-supported, Democratic political power base. The program also resulted in much higher taxes – which were easy to pitch to poor voters who didn’t have to pay them. Cavanagh pushed a new income tax through the state legislature and a “commuter tax” on city workers.
Unfortunately, as with all socialist programs, lots of folks simply don’t like being told what to do. Lots of folks don’t like being plundered by the government. They don’t like losing their jobs because of their race.
In Detroit, they didn’t like paying new, large taxes to fund a largely black and Democratic political hegemony. And so, in 1966, more than 22,000 middle- and upper-class residents moved out of the city.
But what about the poor? As my friend Doug Casey likes to say, in the War on Poverty, the poor lost the most. In July 1967, police attempted to break up a late-night party in the middle of the new “Model City.” The scene turned into the worst race riot of the 1960s. The violence killed more than 40 people and left more than 5,000 people homeless. One of the first stores to be looted was the black-owned pharmacy. The largest black-owned clothing store in the city was also burned to the ground. Cavanagh did nothing to stop the riots, fearing a large police presence would make matters worse. Five days later, Johnson sent in two divisions of paratroopers to put down the insurrection. Over the next 18 months, an additional 140,000 upper- and middle-class residents – almost all of them white – left the city.
And so, you might rightfully ask… after five years of centralized planning, higher taxes, and a fleeing population, what did the government decide to do with its grand experiment, its “Model City”? You’ll never guess….
Seeing it had accomplished nothing but failure, the government endeavored to do still more. The Model City program was expanded and enlarged by 1974’s Community Development Block Grant Program. Here again, politicians would decide which groups (and even individuals) would receive state funds for various “renewal” schemes. Later, Big Business was brought into the fold. In exchange for various concessions, the Big Three automakers “gave” $488 million to the city for use in still more redevelopment schemes in the mid-1990s.
What happened? Even with all of their power and all of the money, centralized planners couldn’t succeed with any of their plans. Nearly all of the upper and middle class left Detroit. The poor fled, too. The Model City area lost 63% of its population and 45% of its housing units from the inception of the program through 1990.
Even today, the crisis continues. At a recent auction of nearly 9,000 seized homes and lots, less than one-fifth of the available properties sold, even with bidding starting at $500. You literally can’t give away most of the “Model City” areas today. The properties put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area the size of Boston – Detroit properties in foreclosure have more than tripled since 2007.
Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a Democrat. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1974 has been black. Detroit has been a major recipient of every major social program since the early 1960s and has received hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans, and programs. We now have a black, Democrat president, who is promising to do to America as a whole what his political mentors have done to Detroit.
Those of you with a Democratic political affiliation may think what I’ve written above is biased or false. You may think what you like. But there is no way to argue that what the government has done to Detroit is anything but a horrendous crime. You may think what I’ve written above is merely a political analysis. Perhaps so, but politicians drive macroeconomic policy. And macroeconomic policy determines key financial metrics, like the trade-weighted value of a currency and key interest rates.
The likelihood America will become a giant Detroit is growing – rapidly. Politicians now control the banking sector, most of the manufacturing sector (including autos), a large amount of media, and are threatening to take over health care and the production of electricity (via cap and trade rules). These are the biggest threats to wealth in the history of our country. And these threats are causing the world’s most accomplished and wealthy investors to actively short sell the United States – something that is unprecedented in my experience.
How many blacks have been shot by someone carrying a gun who was attacked? It’s no wonder the sale of guns is growing rapidly in the US.
What is there to say? Other than societies get the politicians they deserve. People elected her to represent them and they get what they voted for. If that means running the whole city into the ground then that is the way it has to be. Don’t look at why Detroit is the way it is without looking at the root cause: the folks who live there.
Is that racist? unfair? Do you want someone that stupid and rude sitting next to you?
john s.: “Do you want someone that stupid and rude sitting next to you?”
Definitely not. OTOH, she’s in jail now. But one wonders how many other Monica Conyers there are in Detroit.
The fruits of socialism on display.
Posted by: Ken (Kulak)
Unfortunately, your sorry existence is one of the fruits of socialism, comrade.
Utterly uncalled for scuzzy comment, phil. Go crawl back under your rock.
“A former Detroit city councilwoman was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday for bribery….As guards cleared the packed courtroom, Monica Conyers yelled that she planned to appeal…”
“Prosecutors said Conyers (and her former aide Sam Riddle) collected $69,500 by shaking people down…”
@ RFB
Powerful stuff.
EBD >
Ouch, now that’s gotta hurt.
The main thing disturbing the elites is not the black violence….black on Black or black on white….it is the prospect of a backlash….localised or widespread…..
Self defence by a white against a black assailant needs credible black witnesses and/or video evidence to avoid charges of hate criminality.
What is surprising is there has been retreat rather than backlash ….
Racism was a potent factor in the 2008 election…it will justifiably be a bigger factor in 2012…..in reverse……
Ken Kulak….I suspect that Phil is a failed farmer, who inherited a farm and then lost it due to extravagance, incompetance and indolence….we have seen enough of them……
Phil is a failed experiment of a man who tried being a father.
Down on the votefarm citizens are told who to vote for and anything with a “D” after their name is who will run that lovely town. For most of those citizens who cannot identify a “D” beyond a shadow of doubt the democrats will produce cash handouts just before the election so the farm population can get a chance to eyeball the correct name before they are dragged and herded to the polling station.
The fact that the Detroit population hasn’t been able to figure out exactly why their town looks like the hot mess it is speaks to many things, their gullability, their good training and their awful, awful educational system. For starters.
It’s like a teenager’s nasty bedroom, you just have to close the door and let them live like that and hope someday they’ll catch on.
“Buffalo, without the Erie canal, Rochester without Kodak, Wichita without Boeing. Sydney NS without coal and steel, Lunenburg without fishing and boat building….”
Lunenburg has hardly disappeared with the collapse of the fisheries – the last time I was there, its downtown was a thriving strip of restaurants and shops, and the waterfront full of tourists, a far cry from the ghost town I visited in the late ’80s. It helped, of course, that it was an essentially lovely town, and much smaller than Detroit, so that aid money, not squandered, could help revive it as a tourist destination. Sure the industry that made it failed, but there’s where the comparison ends.
Detroit, actually, has been attracting a small but intense group of disaster tourists – young people, mostly, who like to visit to take photos of the ruins. And since it’s so cheap to live there, a small, defensive community of artists and hipster types have begun colonizing the place – an only slightly hopeful situation, since there’s only so much a bunch of bearded kids drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon can do to turn around such devastation. Especially since it’s doubtful that they’d have the wisdom – or the numbers – to vote in an improved city council.
dmorris: “The Detroiters will be okay planting their gardens,until some City bureaucrat decides it’s wrong” … or until the arrival of winter.
minuteman at January 7, 2012 12:52 PM:
…Detroit no longer has a reason to exist. 50 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of auto related jobs in Detroit, now there are none…. When a cities economic reason for being disappears, the city will to. We tend to not think about Detroit like this because it was once such a big place, but it is a one industry town that lost its industry.
Pittsburgh, PA has survived the loss of its steel industry. There are certain fundamentals that mean that Detroit will never be the industrial center it once was, including the declining importance of European markets to American businesses. East Asia is becoming ever more important.
“Detroit no longer has a reason to exist.”
So where are they going to go? 47% illiteracy rate!
Remember when all the “disenfranchised youth” fled to Houston after Katrina? Houston’s crime rate which was already substantial went up 20% overnight.
Let’s face it; Detroit is a Liberalized Ghetto prison of sorts now. The State pumps the money in to sustain the welfare checks and artificially keep the bulk of “prisoners” corralled in one place. As best they can.
The most amazing thing to watch is every other Liberalized country and state going down the same road. They are even importing extra illiterate dependants from the Third World in bulk.
With the open border policies, you can only conclude that this societal destruction is by design. No one could be so stupid, yet there we have it.
“What was observed in Minneapolis was not looting. Rather, it was an instance of ebonomics in action, or ebony economics, a kind of socialism focused on redistribution of material goods to melanistic citizens so that they may enjoy a quality of life approaching a for now poorly defined ideal level. How can one impose a curfew on an economic system? It makes as much sense as imposing a curfew on capitalism. Note how well ebonomics serves those free to participate in the system, such as was the case in NOLA following the Katrina disaster.”
A related quote I like that explains the situation well.
Private sector unions do this eventually to virtually every business/industry. The Automakers would have been crazy to retool in Detroit when they could relocate in a right to work state. The same thugs that ran these unions are now entrenched in Democratic politics throughout the nation and particularly this administration.
It would be much easier to allow the ruins to revert to forest than revive the city given the depraved culture. As for that council meeting, that was tame. People might be surprised (not pleasantly either) to find as bad or worse behavior in their own local government chambers.
Places like Detroit are full of Feral Punks. Like in this new black youth game called Knock Out. This is the extent of their intelligence and ambition. Not all but a good many. http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/a_violent_racist_game_claims_more_victims.html
Stansberry: Detroit’s socialist nightmare is America’s future
Thursday, October 29, 2009
From Porter Stansberry in the S&A Digest:
One of the most important things to remember about socialism – or coercion of any kind – is it fails eventually because human beings have an innate desire for liberty and a strong need for personal property rights. In fact, the origins of government lie in the need of agricultural communities to protect themselves from violence and theft. So it is particularly ironic that in more recent times, it is government itself that has more frequently played the role of bandit. When you start taxing people at extreme rates to pay for socialist “benefits,” when you start telling them which schools their children must attend, when you start giving jobs away to people based on race instead of ability… you quash human freedom, which bogs down productivity… and if continued for long enough, leads to social collapse.
I find it perplexing that only 20 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the West continues to implement laws that mimic all of the failed policies of our former “communist” foes. In fact, our current president won the election by promising to “spread the wealth around.” But… truth be told… we don’t have to look to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to find a society destroyed by coercion, socialism, and the overreaching power of the State. We could just look at Detroit…
In 1961, the last Republican mayor of Detroit lost his re-election bid to a young, intelligent Democrat, with the overwhelming support of newly organized black voters. His name was Jerome Cavanagh. The incumbent was widely considered to be corrupt (and later served 10 years in prison for tax evasion). Cavanagh, a white man, pandered to poor underclass black voters. He marched with Martin Luther King down the streets of Detroit in 1963. (Of course, marching with King was the right thing to do… It’s just Cavanagh’s motives were political not moral.) He instated aggressive affirmative action policies at City Hall. And most critically, he greatly expanded the role of the government in Detroit, taking advantage of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Model Cities Program” – the first great experiment in centralized urban planning.
Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson’s task force. And Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which attempted to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a “model city.” More than $400 million was spent trying to turn inner cities into shining new monuments to government planning. In short, the feds and Democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open or close. In return, the people received cash, training, education, and health care.
The Model Cities program was a disaster for Detroit. But it did accomplish its real goal: The creation of a state-supported, Democratic political power base. The program also resulted in much higher taxes – which were easy to pitch to poor voters who didn’t have to pay them. Cavanagh pushed a new income tax through the state legislature and a “commuter tax” on city workers.
Unfortunately, as with all socialist programs, lots of folks simply don’t like being told what to do. Lots of folks don’t like being plundered by the government. They don’t like losing their jobs because of their race.
In Detroit, they didn’t like paying new, large taxes to fund a largely black and Democratic political hegemony. And so, in 1966, more than 22,000 middle- and upper-class residents moved out of the city.
But what about the poor? As my friend Doug Casey likes to say, in the War on Poverty, the poor lost the most. In July 1967, police attempted to break up a late-night party in the middle of the new “Model City.” The scene turned into the worst race riot of the 1960s. The violence killed more than 40 people and left more than 5,000 people homeless. One of the first stores to be looted was the black-owned pharmacy. The largest black-owned clothing store in the city was also burned to the ground. Cavanagh did nothing to stop the riots, fearing a large police presence would make matters worse. Five days later, Johnson sent in two divisions of paratroopers to put down the insurrection. Over the next 18 months, an additional 140,000 upper- and middle-class residents – almost all of them white – left the city.
And so, you might rightfully ask… after five years of centralized planning, higher taxes, and a fleeing population, what did the government decide to do with its grand experiment, its “Model City”? You’ll never guess….
Seeing it had accomplished nothing but failure, the government endeavored to do still more. The Model City program was expanded and enlarged by 1974’s Community Development Block Grant Program. Here again, politicians would decide which groups (and even individuals) would receive state funds for various “renewal” schemes. Later, Big Business was brought into the fold. In exchange for various concessions, the Big Three automakers “gave” $488 million to the city for use in still more redevelopment schemes in the mid-1990s.
What happened? Even with all of their power and all of the money, centralized planners couldn’t succeed with any of their plans. Nearly all of the upper and middle class left Detroit. The poor fled, too. The Model City area lost 63% of its population and 45% of its housing units from the inception of the program through 1990.
Even today, the crisis continues. At a recent auction of nearly 9,000 seized homes and lots, less than one-fifth of the available properties sold, even with bidding starting at $500. You literally can’t give away most of the “Model City” areas today. The properties put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area the size of Boston – Detroit properties in foreclosure have more than tripled since 2007.
Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a Democrat. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1974 has been black. Detroit has been a major recipient of every major social program since the early 1960s and has received hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans, and programs. We now have a black, Democrat president, who is promising to do to America as a whole what his political mentors have done to Detroit.
Those of you with a Democratic political affiliation may think what I’ve written above is biased or false. You may think what you like. But there is no way to argue that what the government has done to Detroit is anything but a horrendous crime. You may think what I’ve written above is merely a political analysis. Perhaps so, but politicians drive macroeconomic policy. And macroeconomic policy determines key financial metrics, like the trade-weighted value of a currency and key interest rates.
The likelihood America will become a giant Detroit is growing – rapidly. Politicians now control the banking sector, most of the manufacturing sector (including autos), a large amount of media, and are threatening to take over health care and the production of electricity (via cap and trade rules). These are the biggest threats to wealth in the history of our country. And these threats are causing the world’s most accomplished and wealthy investors to actively short sell the United States – something that is unprecedented in my experience.
How many blacks have been shot by someone carrying a gun who was attacked? It’s no wonder the sale of guns is growing rapidly in the US.
What is there to say? Other than societies get the politicians they deserve. People elected her to represent them and they get what they voted for. If that means running the whole city into the ground then that is the way it has to be. Don’t look at why Detroit is the way it is without looking at the root cause: the folks who live there.
Is that racist? unfair? Do you want someone that stupid and rude sitting next to you?
john s.: “Do you want someone that stupid and rude sitting next to you?”
Definitely not. OTOH, she’s in jail now. But one wonders how many other Monica Conyers there are in Detroit.
The fruits of socialism on display.
Posted by: Ken (Kulak)
Unfortunately, your sorry existence is one of the fruits of socialism, comrade.
Utterly uncalled for scuzzy comment, phil. Go crawl back under your rock.
socialism and 500 million for a train to nowhere ,Detroit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld05-5OOLRg&feature=related
Scuzzy or not, what is true, is true. If a welfare bum farmer doesn’t live off the avails of socialism, who does?
More yelling from last year:
@ RFB
Powerful stuff.
EBD >
Ouch, now that’s gotta hurt.
The main thing disturbing the elites is not the black violence….black on Black or black on white….it is the prospect of a backlash….localised or widespread…..
Self defence by a white against a black assailant needs credible black witnesses and/or video evidence to avoid charges of hate criminality.
What is surprising is there has been retreat rather than backlash ….
Racism was a potent factor in the 2008 election…it will justifiably be a bigger factor in 2012…..in reverse……
Ken Kulak….I suspect that Phil is a failed farmer, who inherited a farm and then lost it due to extravagance, incompetance and indolence….we have seen enough of them……
Phil is a failed experiment of a man who tried being a father.
Down on the votefarm citizens are told who to vote for and anything with a “D” after their name is who will run that lovely town. For most of those citizens who cannot identify a “D” beyond a shadow of doubt the democrats will produce cash handouts just before the election so the farm population can get a chance to eyeball the correct name before they are dragged and herded to the polling station.
The fact that the Detroit population hasn’t been able to figure out exactly why their town looks like the hot mess it is speaks to many things, their gullability, their good training and their awful, awful educational system. For starters.
It’s like a teenager’s nasty bedroom, you just have to close the door and let them live like that and hope someday they’ll catch on.
“Buffalo, without the Erie canal, Rochester without Kodak, Wichita without Boeing. Sydney NS without coal and steel, Lunenburg without fishing and boat building….”
Lunenburg has hardly disappeared with the collapse of the fisheries – the last time I was there, its downtown was a thriving strip of restaurants and shops, and the waterfront full of tourists, a far cry from the ghost town I visited in the late ’80s. It helped, of course, that it was an essentially lovely town, and much smaller than Detroit, so that aid money, not squandered, could help revive it as a tourist destination. Sure the industry that made it failed, but there’s where the comparison ends.
Detroit, actually, has been attracting a small but intense group of disaster tourists – young people, mostly, who like to visit to take photos of the ruins. And since it’s so cheap to live there, a small, defensive community of artists and hipster types have begun colonizing the place – an only slightly hopeful situation, since there’s only so much a bunch of bearded kids drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon can do to turn around such devastation. Especially since it’s doubtful that they’d have the wisdom – or the numbers – to vote in an improved city council.