Tag: detroit

Detroit inches closer to bankruptcy.

@caroljsroth noted this in passing, and so I went looking, and lo! The day of Robocop approaches.

A review team assigned by the state of Michigan declared Tuesday that the city of Detroit is in a state of “Final Emergency.”

This once booming city that thrived on the American automobile industry is on the verge of bankruptcy after a long and tumultuous economic decline. Gov. Rick Snyder will now have the green light to go ahead with Michigan’s emergency manager law, which calls to appoint a manager to financially struggling local governments of the state. Based on the law’s unsuccessful history, Gov. Snyder may have some difficult days ahead in hopes of saving Detroit.

I still say that what Detroit needs is a zombie plan.

Moe Lane

QotD, It’s From A Detroit Councilwoman, So Brace Yourself edition.

The councilwoman in question is one JoAnn Wilson, who wants Barack Obama to bailout the city of Detroit.  The quote in question?

“After the election of Jimmy Carter, the honorable Coleman Alexander Young, he went to Washington, D.C. and came home with some bacon,” said Watson. “That’s what you do.”

…For those unfamiliar with Mr. Young; he was mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993.  In the beginning of his tenure Detroit was a mildly struggling Rust Belt city trying to deal with an economic slump; by its end Detroit was deemed to be the perfect setting for Robocop.  It is a measure of just how bad things have gotten since that Mr. Young’s administration is seen as a Golden Age, but not as much as the one that Robocop now looks quaint.

Via AoSHQ.

But does Wayne County really WANT Detroit?

Would you?

It would no doubt be controversial, but the idea of dissolving the fiscally struggling city of Detroit and absorbing it into Wayne County is being tossed around in Lansing.

Then again, what does one do with Detroit? It’s probably – almost certainly – the largest utterly failed city in American history: large portions of it have already been abandoned. Would it perhaps make sense to shut down the rest and relocate as much of the population that wishes to leave? I honestly don’t know at this point.

#rsrh US Secret Service under Obama continues to live down to its new reputation.

At first, I thought that this was funny:

A U-Haul being used by the secret service for Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to the Labor Day Rally in Detroit on Monday was stolen out of a hotel parking lot Sunday morning.

(H/T Gateway Pundit)  But it’s not actually funny.  It’s alarming, if not downright nerve-wracking.  If the Secret Service can’t even notice when one of its own vehicles gets stolen, what precisely guarantees that they’ll notice if something gets added to one of their vehicles?

Sorry* if that ruins the joke for folks.

Moe Lane

*That’s what’s known as a ‘polite’ sorry.  Which is to say, a fib.

#rsrh The Pre-Lost City of Detroit.

I mean that literally, by the way: some time in the next twenty years we’re going to see the inhabitants of Detroit simply give up and move en masse in a folk-migration; the city will become unincorporated; and then the forces of Nature will swarm in and quickly reduce the whole place to a set of ruins that will make the career of some lucky Fortieth Century archeologist when he or she stumbles across the proof that the mythical Mo-town of First American Republic legend actually existed.  With any luck, the Robocop statue will likewise survive and make ’em think that this was the Mo-towner’s titular god.

If only.

Via AoSHQ. Continue reading #rsrh The Pre-Lost City of Detroit.

#rsrh Detroit. Just… Detroit.

Walter Russell Meade is trying to patiently explain things to the Left again:

Detroit isn’t broke because it has an African American majority; it is broke because for decades its politicians have spent more money than they had, and because Detroit never figured out how to reinvent itself as it lost its industrial core. (Pittsburgh and Chicago are two rust belt cities that have been much more successful than Detroit.  Atlanta has done much better under African American leadership than Detroit.) The state government and the feds aren’t refusing to bail it out because so many Detroiters are African American.  The state doesn’t have the money to bail it out, and the GOP nationally believes that bailouts enable bad behavior rather than changing it.  There is no support for bailouts in predominantly non-Black jurisdictions like New York state and California.

Continue reading #rsrh Detroit. Just… Detroit.

#rsrh It is time for Detroit to get a zombie plan.

And before anyone points out that Detroit does not actually have any zombies, let me note that at this point it does not matter:

The war to keep the lights on in Detroit is a serious one. Thieves, antiquated equipment and a lack of funding have made it impossible for city officials to catch up to the problem.

City officials estimate 15-20 percent of the 88,000 lights in the Motor City are not working, and they acknowledge that figure could be as high as 50 percent in some neighborhoods. Providing lighting to the city costs $10.7 million annually.

The city is already in a post-apocalyptic scenario: it merely needs to have its leadership accept that.

So here’s my plan. Continue reading #rsrh It is time for Detroit to get a zombie plan.

#rsrh Time for another depressing Detroit slideshow.

As my wife put it: “Detroit?  I thought that you were looking at pictures of Poland.”

Nah.  Poland’s embracing a free market economy.

Moe Lane

PS: That’s not a wrecking ball.  Just time.

PPS: This is the result of forty years of one-party, liberal Democratic rule.  Avoid it.

The *true* John Conyers scandal.

Background: back over Thanksgiving weekend John Conyers III (the son of Rep. John Conyers) reported a theft of computers and concert tickets from the car that he was using.  The problem?  John Conyers III was using the car unlawfully: it was leased to his father’s Congressional office as an official vehicle, and Conyers was not using it in an official capacity.  And it wasn’t anything like an one-time event, either: John Conyers III also got a speeding ticket on the car back in September.  The behavior was so egregious that Rep. Conyers isn’t even trying to fight it: he’s just swiftly reimbursing the government as comprehensively as possible before the 112th Congress gets sworn in.

None of this is the true scandal.  The true scandal is that we’re only hearing about this now.  Rep. Conyers – who is, by the way, still the JUDICIARY CHAIR – has a history of abusing official resources.  His wife is in jail for bribery.  There is thus zero excuse for the media not to jump on this with both feet… and if the man had an R after his name, they would have.  Then again, if Rep. Conyers had had an R after his name the media would have destroyed him years ago.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I think that the new Ethics Committee leadership should look into this – and that they should not give this the same wrist slap in 2011 that their Democratic counterparts did in 2007.  I am tired of Democratic politicians thinking that they can get a pass on not even having to care about propriety; I am even more tired of them having any practical justification for thinking that way.

The good news about this attempted terrorist attack?

There’s only one bit of good news, but it’s reassuring: airline passengers haven’t forgotten the Flight 93 Lesson.

Jafry was sitting in the 16th row — three rows behind the passenger — when he heard “a pop and saw some smoke and fire.” Then, he said, “a young man behind me jumped on him.”

In short: you can’t always choose not to be a target, but you can always choose not to be a victim.