Maybe this is what Big Sis was actually talking about when she said “man-caused disasters:” The socio-cultural lines that can be drawn straight from former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young to Trayvon Martin.
Young’s effect on the cultural values of Detroit, resulting eventually in the election of Kwame Kilpatrick, are echoed in today’s standardized, pervasive inner city culture, and reflected in the gangster government of Barack Obama and Eric Holder. This culture has more to do with Trayvon Martin’s death than concealed carry permits (very little) or stand your ground laws (absolutely nothing). If that seems like a stretch, you have to remember that George Zimmerman’s acquittal is being called racist, as was the appointment of Kevyn Orr as Detroit’s Emergency Manager. For the same reasons:
The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment
Black leaders weren’t so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.
Shelby Steele
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being…
One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?
How the Media Has Distorted a Tragedy
Cathy Young destroys the Liberal talking points about the attempted railroading of George Zimmerman. You need to know these before attempting to discuss Zimmerman’s acquittal with a Trayvon Martin aficionado.
In a bid for the surreality Hall of Fame, Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina moves us to the Detroit bankruptcy, by citing “failure to honor president Obama” as a reason to stay the Detroit bankruptcy proceeding.
Ingham County judge rules Detroit bankruptcy be withdrawn; Schuette appeals
Gary Heinlein
“It’s cheating, sir, and it’s cheating good people who work,” the judge told assistant state Attorney General Brian Devlin. “It’s also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy.”
She thinks so much of her action that she directed a copy of the declaratory judgment be sent to President Obama, probably intending it be made part of the eventual Presidential Library humor section. Maybe she’s looking for a Federal appointment.
Then Edward McClelland strikes again (see post below for comment on his earlier excuses for Detroit.)
Detroit is your problem, too
Detroit’s bankruptcy affects Oakland County, the state of Michigan, and really, every state, county and municipality in the nation. If Detroit defaults on its general obligation bonds, governments everywhere — but especially in Michigan — may end up paying more to borrow money, as the bond market responds to the precedent set by a major city returning pennies on the dollar to investors. When a state’s largest city goes bankrupt, it creates an increased risk for all the governments around it — including the state itself…
L. Brooks Patterson built a career out of telling his constituents that Detroit’s problems were not their problems. Now that they are, his constituents are going to pay for it.
Michigan’s refusal to share responsibility for Detroit’s finances goes all the way back to the 1970s, when Republican governor William Milliken proposed a regional tax base — only to have the plan shot down by the state legislature. Had Milliken been successful, Detroit would not be in bankruptcy today.
I looked for the sentence “When a state’s largest city is so thoroughly venal, it creates an increased risk for all the governments around it — including the state itself…,” in vain.
Mr. McClelland’s point is that every Michigan taxpayer should have been paying for Detroit’s corruptocrat government all along. He’s right that Detroit would not be in bankruptcy today only in the sense that the whole state would be. It’s like cheering for the metastasis to win.
One wonders if either McClelland or Aquilina felt the same sympathy for the GM and Chrysler bondholders. McClelland would probably have argued for tariff barriers to be raised against imported cars, and Aquilina would declare their importation unconstitutional because of the threat to UAW pension plans. Oh wait, if it wasn’t for screwing over the bondholders, there would be no UAW pension plans.
Mr. McClelland again blames “all the white people” who fled Detroit, oblivious to the fact that anyone who could leave Detroit, has left Detroit, superficial melanin content notwithstanding.
As to “white flight”, it wasn’t just white people, or even white Hispanics, who left Detroit:
The Unheavenly City
Michael Barone
Detroit’s black population peaked at 777,000 in 1990; it leveled off to 775,000 in 2000 and plunged to 590,000 in 2010. Blacks with decent jobs and steady habits have been moving to the suburbs or back to their grandparents’ South, and those who remain tend to be the people with no good alternative and no hope.