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Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has fingered the main culprits behind Detroit’s bankruptcy. According to him, it’s none other than Fox News host Sean Hannity and all his fellow racist conservatives who were threatened by Smokey Robinson. In his July 27 screed for Salon headlined “Why the Right Hates Detroit” O’Hehir claimed the fall of big cities like Detroit and New Orleans had less to do with longtime Democratic rule and more to do with the right’s desire, as seen in the “coded racism of Sean Hannity” to punish the cities that spawned “the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson...

Liberals incessantly claim fealty to “science,” while falsely caricaturing libertarians and conservatives as the ones stubbornly ideological and averse to real-world facts. Scientific method, however, involves objective observation and testing beliefs against results. In that vein, it is liberals who prove habitually impervious to facts and the disastrous real-world results of their philosophies. Take gun control as one recurring example. Liberals persist in their anti-Second Amendment crusade despite irrefutable data that America’s murder rate has been cut in half over the past three decades even while gun possession has reached record highs and firearms restrictions have drastically receded across America....

**SNIP** Usually, they vote with their feet and leave. But in extreme cases like Detroit, they simply fail to pay them: Nearly half of the owners of Detroit's 305,000 properties failed to pay their tax bills last year, exacerbating a punishing cycle of declining revenues and diminished services for a city in a financial crisis, according to a Detroit News analysis of government records. ... "Why pay taxes?" asked Fred Phillips, who owes more than $2,600 on his home on an east-side block where five owners paid 2011 taxes. "Why should I send them taxes when they aren't supplying services?...

Detroit could be looking to ObamaCare for a bailout as city leaders try to cut back on retiree health costs as they enter bankruptcy proceedings. The New York Times reported Monday that the city is proposing a plan aimed at reducing its $5.7 billion in outstanding retiree health costs. In short, they want to take those retirees too young to qualify for Medicare and send them into the ObamaCare insurance markets -- which are scheduled to launch next year. Doing so would ease the burden on the Detroit coffers by taking them off city coverage. But it would inevitably increase...

Growing up in Roseville in the 1970s, by the time I reached junior high school the majority of my neighborhood friends were refugees from Detroit, those who fled at a time when the inner city was showing the earliest signs of degenerating into an urban wasteland. These suburban families represented the beginning of white flight, a massive population shift that would prove to be Detroit’s undoing over the next four decades. Once safely settled in suburbia, these whites would eventually lead the charge against cross-district busing and would congregate as an anti-Detroit voting bloc. That led to Macomb County political...

On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will took on proponents of federal assistance for Detroit, which declared bankruptcy earlier this month. According to Will, the city isn’t undergoing a fiscal crisis, but is facing a much more serious cultural one, which is the source of its woes. “Can’t solve the problems because the problems are cultural,” Will said. “You have a city, 139 square miles. You can graze cattle in vast portions of it. Dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. You have 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national...

Sina Finance reports that since the bankruptcy on July 18 was announced, the Chinese website Sina Weibo has been all abuzz about how properties can be picked up for a pittance. Caroline Chen, a real estate broker in Troy, Michigan, claims to have received numerous calls from people in China. Chen says that some people have called and said they want to buy 100 to 200 properties. She said that a colleague recently sold 30 properties to a Chinese buyer. The buyer said we don't need to see the properties just pick the good ones.

Michigan's Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, said on Saturday he would defend retirees who risk losing public pensions because of Detroit's bankruptcy, putting him at odds with the city's emergency manager appointed by fellow Republican Governor Rick Snyder. Schuette, an elected official, said the Michigan state constitution is "crystal clear" in stating that pension plans are a contractual obligation that may not be diminished or impaired. "Retirees may face a potential financial crisis not of their own making, possibly a result of pension fund mismanagement," Schuette said in a statement. The attorney general said he would file in federal...

A lot of people have been writing about Detroit lately and why the one-time economic powerhouse is now a bankrupt echo of wasted opportunity. Most of it, coming from the usual suspects at MSNBC, is a lie designed to direct the public’s attention away from the oil – the lifeblood of the Motor City – on their ideological hands. The problems of Detroit are not so much economic one; they were caused, for the most part, by political corruption. Unlike most of those opining on television and in print, I was born in Detroit, in (the now gone) Mt. Carmel...

Selling only 38 pieces from the Detroit Institute of Art could raise $2.5 billion. By John Fund Everyone has an idea about how to handle bankrupt Detroit. Public-employee unions want a state or federal bailout. A liberal state-court judge in Lansing wants to block the bankruptcy because it might reduce government pensions — with no thought as to where the money to pay for them will come from. Supply-siders want to create “innovation zones” that would spur growth by reducing taxes and regulations in the inner city, but it would be years before that measure would have an effect.

Failure sometimes has an inertia that is difficult to stop. Detroit’s reality is anything but pretty: Detroit city services are already stretched extremely thin. On average, police take about an hour to respond to calls for help, and 40% of street lights are shut off to save money. Because of a lack of funds, the police force has shrunk in size to the point that it simply can’t respond in any meaningful way to help citizens who are victims of crime. As you might imagine then, crime is horrific. City services are so minimal as to almost be non-existent. Yet...

Symbolizing the dramatic decline of Motor City, many buildings and structures in the former manufacturing mecca of Detroit, Mich. lay in crumbling and weather-beaten ruins. In his bestselling book, "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman (who has reported from abandoned cities such as Chernobyl, Ukraine and Varosha, Cyprus) wrote that structures crumble as weather does unrepaired damage and other life forms create new habitats. A common structure would begin to fall apart as water eventually leaks into the roof, erodes the wood and rusts the nail, he wrote. Without intervention, many of Detroit's abandoned structures would eventually succumb to nature's...

The City of Detroit tried to file for bankruptcy last week. A state judge initially blocked the filing, but a federal judge ruled Wednesday this week that the bankruptcy case can move forward. More legal maneuvering is ahead and Detroit may well succeed in the end. After all, Detroit owes somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 to $20 billion to over 100,000 creditors. One group of creditors particularly wary of a municipal bankruptcy is Detroit’s public sector labor unions. They fear a bankruptcy judge might allow the city to cancel or reduce their pension or retiree health benefits. The unions...

Of all the depressing facts about the once great City of Detroit, this to me is the most upsetting: In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000. Government -- federal, state, and local -- made this happen. I know this from experience. Government corrupted the Detroit work force. That corruption drove away my company too. Until 1984, I was a business owner in the city, employing about 20. I moved my business 60 miles away. I didn't want to leave, but I was, in effect, forced to. Many think that crime spurred...

A federal bankrutpcy judge ruled Wednesday that federal courts will decide if Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy, staying challenges to the bankruptcy in state court. Detroit's Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr—a bankruptcy expert appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder earlier this year to oversee Detroit's finances—has said the federal bankruptcy filing is necessary to get the city out from under some $18 billion in liabilities. But the city's employee unions argued the bankruptcy is an end-run around the state constitution, which protects their pension benefits. The unions backed a series of lawsuits filed in Michigan courts to block the bankruptcy. Last week,...

Listen up folks, after you read the bankruptcy filing for Detroit. 1. Right now, the City cannot meet its basic obligations to its citizens. 2. Right now, the City cannot meet its basic obligations to its creditors. 3. The failure of the City to meet its obligations to its citizens is the primary cause of its inability to meet its obligations to its creditors. 4. The only feasible path to ensuring the City will be able to meet obligations in the future is to have a successful restructuring via the bankruptcy process that recognizes the fundamental importance of ensuring the...

In the 1950s, Detroit was the fourth largest city in America, with a population of nearly 2 million. It was also a middle class paradise, with the highest median family income of all major cities in the entire country. The last Republican mayor of Detroit was elected in the 1950s. Then the 1960s happened, and Detroit became a socialist one party state. And you know what that one party was. Over the next half century, city politics in Detroit was a battle between Left and Lefter, or socialism versus communism. Let’s face reality and speak the truth. We see there...

Federal judge blocks lawsuits against Detroit’s bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes stopped three lawsuits threatening to undo the city’s Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing. Detroit retirees had argued that the bankruptcy could dimish their pensions. DETROIT — A federal judge agreed with Detroit on Wednesday and stopped any lawsuits challenging the city's bankruptcy, declaring his courtroom the exclusive venue for legal action in the largest filing by a local government in U.S. history. The decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes was a major victory for Detroit, especially after an Ingham County judge last week said that Gov. Rick Snyder ignored the...

Current vending laws state that it is illegal, even for licensed vendors, to sell on both public and private property in the most populated areas of Detroit, including Midtown, the central business district and near the stadiums. Even more surprising than the rules regarding where vendors can sell is the extremely narrow list of approved items they are allowed to sell. The ordinance governing stationary vendors, foot peddlers and street vendors states they "shall be allowed to sell only the following items from an approved location: coffee, beverages and frankfurters as approved by the department of health and wellness promotion,...

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