Posted on 07/31/2013 7:54:59 PM PDT by Lorianne
Did the progressive “blue model” of city governance destroy Detroit? And if so, is Detroit’s bankruptcy a deeper concern to progressive cities like Chicago, Oakland, and Santa Fe, which are beginning to teeter under the weight of unsustainable pension liabilities?
To be sure, Detroit’s multi-decade fall into despair, disrepair and ultimate bankruptcy had myriad causes: the shrinking US-owned auto industry, unsustainable pension deals, and city council investments in gee-whiz development deals instead of a focus on basic maintenance and services.
But critics say the failure of the Democratic one-party machine in Detroit to build racial peace, control crime, and boost business, in fact, represents a cautionary tale for more robust but politically similar “blue” cities like Chicago, which took a three-notch credit rating hit at the same moment Detroit leaders announced its Chapter 9 bankruptcy intentions.
“Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long,” writes Walter Russell Mead, in the American Interest magazine. “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. The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding Detroit’s fate.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Monica Conyers is still in federal prison.
John Conyers is still in congress.
YES.
Not to be insensitive, but this is also a case of black self-rule.
Nahh.... As long as the democrats in charge and their buddies got wealthy then it’s fine. That’s all they ever cared about anyway. So mission accomplished.
When will the dumbchit liberals ever wake up to the destruction their policies cause?
bump
The leaders of Detroit are still blaming whitey
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is still in jail. His mommy is no longer in Congress.
Stockton, CA is run by Dummocrats too.
So was the OC pension fund - run by a Dummocrat.
I know they need a scapegoat but it happened all over the rust belt...
Unions and attendant pension plans locked horns with intractable and unimaginative management and engaged in a death spiral while nimbler economies elsewhere adjusted and overcame.
Took a while for the beast to die but when the ox quit breathing the ticks and lice and stomach worms soon ran out of flesh.
The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding Detroit’s fate.
That might interfere with the Chicagoization and Detroitification of America.
Thanks for the update. /sarc
Well maybe some slackers don’t know.
You have that right. It would become a no-mans land overnight.
doubt it. the weakest always buckle and beg.
Monica Conyers has been out of prison for some time now. She’s working at a car dealership.
No amount of empirical evidence will ever change a ‘progressives’ mind about their idiotic, unworkable world views and policies. Detroit should be a case study of what NOT to do, but instead it will be roundly ignored by the greedy liberals and repeated everywhere they can get away with it.
The reason is, they get to control the cash flow in a “blue” city and that means they can make themselves rich through backroom deals and other shady practices. The city comes last. The liberal politicians and their liberal co-conspirators come first and foremost.
Let alone the list of black Mayors of Detroit for the last 30 yrs, all one has to think of is Pols like Torricelli and Rod Blagojevich on how egregious the corruption has gotten, and those are just an example of a couple that got caught. It’s everywhere that democrats have been able to set up shop and take complete control.
Dems are always the most corrupt but whitey and Republicans always get all the blame. Detroit has had no Republican or whitey involvement so that dog won’t hunt here and so this will be ignored by the establishment media. It’s the same scenario Obama’s trying to set up to all of America.
Nice to see ya’ again GeronL.
Nice to see you too again too.
You are exactly right, of course. They have done this federally too, some of it. The taxpayers money are funneled to leftwing organizations in the guise of grants for everything and anything.
$700M PR budget for ObamaCare, how much of that will end up going to ACORN and La Raza type groups?
It is something that needs to be stopped.
Cities should be treated like other corporations, with each citizen being a shareholder.
If the corporation goes bankrupt, then the shareholders are wiped out and assets sold.
Voters might pay a little more attention to the running of their corporation under such a system.
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