Thought we could use an open thread to discuss the fact that Detroit just declared bankruptcy. What are people’s thoughts on this?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
Technically true, but collectively nonsense
No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.
Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.
“Squeaker” McCarthy
Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.
Consistently wrong since 2002
A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
Let there be snark.
We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.
Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.
Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Redshirt
I heard Kid Rock might buy it.
All Hail Kid Rock!
afishstick
Anyone else having trouble with Balloon Juice not showing up on Feedly(/other RSS readers)? The last update I have there is 7/16. Perhaps it has something to do with the “attack site” problem from a couple days ago?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I think it’s a fucking tragedy. Mid 20th century, it was the wealthiest city in the country. They’ve made some mistakes, no doubt, but the decline of the city is largely due to factors beyond the city’s controll. When the cause is a natural disaster we rush in aid and rebuild, but when it’s an economic, rather than an actual, tsunami we just shake our heads and look away. Or worse, kick them when they’re down.
jefft452
How is this possible?
I thought abolishing democracy and appointing an emergency financial manager solved all problems
cdmarine
Hey, any Detroit-area people around here?
Longshot, but if you’re in the Detroit area and you’re a baseball and/or theater fan, I have two tickets (including parking) to the play “Ernie” next Thursday evening (7/25) at the City Theatre, and I can’t use them. I’d like to give them to someone who will actually use them. They’re a printable PDF, so I can just e-mail them to you.
If you truly believe you really will use these, please e-mail me at cdmarine .at. gmail .dot. com. It will make me and 1000 baby Jeebuses cry if you take these tickets from me and don’t actually use them.
(I JUST posted this in the comments to the post below this one. Figures.)
Thoughtcrime
Panic In Detroit.
David Hunt
When does OCP foreclose all city assets and begin construction on Delta City?
NotMax
Detroit, Detroit
It’s a helluva town
The debts go up
And the populace down
ArchTeryx
@David Hunt: Man, Paul Verhoeven was absolutely prophetic on this one, wasn’t he?
Highly recommend watching Robocop if you haven’t already. Despite the name and main character, it’s actually a superb (if incredibly violent) satire on privatization, the corporate state, and Detroit’s decline.
SG
The better to carve up and auction off the corpse, then distribute the spoils to the totally deserving banks and other worthy 0.001% types.
? Martin
Austerity at work.
This is like the company, when they miss earnings, decide to lay off 20% of their workforce in order to get profitable again, only to find themselves a quarter later with 20% fewer workers and 20% less revenue because, well, the whole point of a business is that you need workers to produce revenue.
It’s hard to invest during a decline but that’s exactly what Detroit needed. They needed help from the state or the feds to invest in and reinvent the city. But neither would happen because with the sole exception of 9/11 NYC, the American narrative is that cities deserve to drown in their own cesspools, and are undeserving of support. And I can’t help but believe that is solely due to the fact that cities are where most of our minorities live. They aren’t bastions of white protestants that get up to milk the cows every day at 4AM. They’re pakistani immigrants that get up to drive a cab at 4AM, so fuck em.
And never mind that our cities are what funds the country. They’re who pre-pays for the suburban infrastructure so white flight can happen on the cheap. They pay for a thousand miles of highways in Montana so 17 people can get to WalMart. Those tax donor states? They’re all dominated by cities. But invest in them? Fuck that. We might accidentally help a brown doing that, or contribute to a gay lifestyle, or help a Volt get sold.
Redshirt
@ArchTeryx: Verhoeven is pretty dang awesome. Starship Troopers is a wonderful satire of fascism.
EconWatcher
The city looked like Berlin circa 1945 when I went to high school near there in the 80s. I can only imagine what it looks like now.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
I feel sorry for the pensioners who worked for years putting into their pension system, and are now going to get screwed. And the city workers who had nothing to do with this shitstorm.
Wiesman
My conservative friends on Facebook are crowing that this is the natural result of allowing Democrats to govern a city. I really need to do some culling.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
That’s because, to way too many, the fall of Detroit is the fault of 3 things:
1) Unions
2) Black people
3) Democrats
Thusly, it deserves to rot because it’s all its own fault.
BGinCHI
@Redshirt: His earlier Dutch stuff is even better.
Mike G
@ArchTeryx:
I want a 6000SUX, “…with really crummy gas mileage!”
Forum Transmitted Disease
Inevitable. It’s been America’s worst run city for over 40 years. Literally every bad decision that could have been made, was, both by public and private entities. There may not be much to do save to burn it, bulldoze it, and walk away.
And yeah, Robocop. Absolutely nailed a lot of things, and this was one of them.
ETA: been a while since I saw Robocop, can’t remember if the black folks were blamed or not. At any rate, they are being blamed, even by the few liberals I work with.
Chris
@Wiesman:
Do it. You won’t believe how therapeutic it is.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@ArchTeryx:
Which makes the decline of the “Franchise” after…you know, becoming a Franchise all the sadder. It really was a scathing movie underneath all the violent trappings.
Just Some Fuckhead
Don’t be surprised if Canada tries to pick it up for “free” by buying the largest note.
Keith
@Mike G: I’d buy that for a dollar!
Trollhattan
No fair,that’s a California thing.
Jerry
Makes me very sad. I’ve spent some glorious times in Saint Andrew’s in that city.
Gravenstone
@Redshirt: Doogie Howser, SS was quite the head trip.
Mary G
Nothing to do with the color of the skin of many of the residents, nothing whatsoever.
Violet
So what’s going to happen to it? It’s not like it’s going to disappear or even disappear for awhile and then reappear, like Twinkies did. Will it get split up into several smaller cities? Sold off to a corporate buyer–“Welcome to The City of Koch Detroit!”? Unincorporate so it’s the wild west? What will they do?
ArchTeryx
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: The second wasn’t so bad – it pretty much took the first and took it Up To Eleven, though the conflict between Robocop and Cain was much more bog standard.
After that it became just another action cartoon. You want to see that done RIGHT, go see the Iron Man series!
BGinCHI
@efgoldman: Our bond rating got downgraded today, by Moody’s.
Thanks Rahm.
And fuck Moody’s.
FlipYrWhig
@Wiesman: What are their examples of what happens when Republicans run cities? Giuliani, then…
burnspbesq
The only thing certain is that hundredss of lawyers will bill thousands of hours.
Bond holders are almost certain to get hoses.
There will be years of litigation over the interaction between Chapter 9 and a provision in the Michigan Constitution that supposedly protects public employee retirement benefits. No idea how that will come out.
Public services are almost certain to be further reduced, possibly leaving large areas effectively uninhabitable.
Huge, huge mess.
ArchTeryx
@Mike G: The “6000SUX” commercial wasn’t the best part. The best part was when one of the thugs proudly shows off the new SUX he got as a bribe – and the leader obligingly demonstrates his brand new anti-tank rifle on it. Couldn’t. Stop. Laughing.
(And yeah, the laughter is pretty dark, both in the movie and in this awful Real World situation Detroit finds itself in. Sometimes, gallows humor is all we have to fall back on).
Redshirt
There needs to be Federal intervention.
Violet
@burnspbesq:
Hasn’t that sort of thing been going on for awhile, as the city stopped trash collection and so forth to some very lightly inhabited areas of the city? I’m sure it’ll only get worse from here. Sigh.
Violet
I blame this on Ted Nugent for not being dead or in jail.
Schlemizel
For all his many many faults Hank Ford had a simply brilliant idea: pay your workers enough so that they can afford the crap they make. Detroit was built on this very simple idea and the backs of millions of hard working UAW members who sweated the line and bought the cars. The brilliant MBA carrying masters of the universe know that is a stupid idea and it is far more profitable to have slave labor in China or child labor in India build the crap for 35 cents an hour. Detroit was dead when these geniuses carried out their plan.
I know he gets a lot of hate here, some justified much not but you really should read Mike Moore’s book. It contains an excellent chapter about attending an event in Mexico when he was a reporter. The event was put on by St Ronnies people and it was all about how you could take advantage of the laws he was getting passed to move jobs from the US to third world countries with cheap labor and no safety or environmental regulations.
Detroit is just the canary the entire coal mine is full of the toxic gas that this gutting of the American worker is producing. Detroit will never come back & every other major industrial city is on the same path or soon will be. Those jobs are never coming back unless we accept working for the same wages & under the same conditions as the cheapest bidder. No politician can change that. We are fucked & the only question is will we die quietly or will we, as a nation, in our stupidity, start WWIII. And if we do will it be before humans poison themselves out of existence.
But thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.
ruemara
I see the outsourcing, “public/private partnership” mentality taking hold here in CA and it is decimating workforces for smaller town, yet as funds get tighter, there are more cuts, more hate to government workers and more very happy business people being gladhanded by elected officials as they accept fat new contracts that cost more than the workers. Truly, I have no idea how bad it has to get before the glorious few of the 47% wake the fuck up and the entire 99% take fucking politics seriously. All I know is, I want to leave this country while I’m still young enough to work elsewhere. I don’t think NZ needs a pensioner.
Anne Laurie
@Mary G:
Hell, Detroit’s been the rightwing nightmare of “those people” for over a century. First that crypto-socialist Henry Ford imported “filthy Eye-talians” and “dumb Polacks” from the European ghettos to produce those ungodly rattletraps that would enable decent Midwesterners’ children to escape from their parents’ narrow little bubbles. Then the Appalachian hillbillies and “colored” tenant farmers started fleeing the pellagra-belt misery to which Libertarian Jesus had appointed them, to go work in the Detroit factories. During the war, otherwise normal young ladies stopped dreaming about finding a good provider & started riveting steel. And even after St. Reagan did his best to crush the Rust Belt, all varieties of Ay-rabs started movin’ in (many of them fleeing neocon wars in the Middle East)…
Higgs Boson's Mate
@burnspbesq:
If you have Google Earth installed, search to Gilbo Ave. and Leander St. in Detroit. Blocks of streets with no houses. It’s easy to find more of the same if you just move your view anywhere around the airport. Square miles of Detroit are returning to prairie.
Their best bet is to have Detroit declared a UN World Heritage Site commemorating American manufacturing.
kc
My thoughts are that I can’t wait to read all the newspaper website comments blaming this on “the blacks.”
Linnaeus
About the only for certain right now is that no one really knows what they’re doing. We’re in uncharted territory here.
I grew up in suburban Detroit (most of my family still lives there), so I really don’t have much authority to speak about the city itself. The optimistic side of me thinks that Detroit wasn’t going to get any options better than this, and at least this will be a controlled process that won’t be subject to the EM’s decrees alone. The pessimistic side of me thinks this is a chance for TPTB to loot the city and make it a neofeudalist pilot project for the rest of the country.
BGinCHI
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Their best bet is to have Detroit declared a UN World Heritage Site commemorating American
manufacturing. corporate capitalism.ETA: Strike failure, which is probably appropriate in this thread.
Liquid
@ArchTeryx: Did they throw in a Blaupunkt?
the Conster
Detroit sold for scrap
Baud
I’ve been reading about Detroit’s decline for so long now, I hope this is the beginning of a fresh start for the city. Fresh starts are what bankruptcies are supposed to be about in the first place.
Redshirt
Take off to Canada, hoser. Nuke it from orbit, eh.
burnspbesq
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Detroit is a convenient place from which to ship agricultural commodities grown in the upper Midwest down the Great Lakes and out through the St. Lawrence Seaway. When farming moves north as a result of the desertification of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, it will be a thriving port–and not much else.
Detroit 2050: The Breadbasket of Europe.
ranchandsyrup
The michiganders I know are saying “About time!” and “let it burn”.
MGB
Now mind you, I moved from the city of Detroit to Chicago in 2000, but from what friends back home tell me, this is actually kind of a welcome thing. Ok, maybe not welcome, but the better of a lot of crappy options. The EM has some limits to what he can do, and the City Council, which has been mismanaging the city as far as I can remember, has even less say.
Not really sure what’s going to happen, but I hope it makes my hometown a better place (I’m being an optimist, dammit!)
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Schlemizel:
Only the genius of the MBAs would think that having significant numbers of Americans unemployed or under-employed is a great idea in an economy based two-thirds on consumer spending.
NotMax
MGB
Detroit native and your cybernym is MGB?
Now that’s irony.
MGB
@NotMax: It’s my initials…and I like my name, as it’s me.
BGinCHI
Isn’t Ted Nugent from Detroit??
The jokes just write themselves from there.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
Apparently, the governor did an end run around pension funds trying to stop the bankruptcy.
mai naem
What’s already been said. The city will be auctioned off in pieces to banksters and hedge funds. The bankruptcy will be blamed on the Ni*clangs* and the Democrat Detroit government. Thanks a lot Kwame. Dumbass.
Keith G
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Not unlike New Orleans, there will be depopulation caused by lack of services and a questionable safety net. Low land and housing prices will attract those with disposable cash and/or a tolerance for risk and those who can afford privatized services.
Where will everyone else go? Many will not travel far, I think. Others will join the economic boom in here in Texas (more blue voters, yay!) and others may head west to the high growth areas out there.
Another Great Migration?
IowaOldLady
I lived in Detroit most of my life, first in the city and then in the suburbs, and I don’t have a lot of insight. When we moved here, it was obvious Detroit was becoming a much meaner place to live. Other cities were resurrecting themselves but Detroit never showed signs of it. There was undoubtedly corruption–money hidden in the police chief’s kitchen ceiling for instance. But I don’t have any systematic sense of the forces at work in city’s destruction.
Schlemizel
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
And that is why we are completely hosed. Those jobs are never coming back, unless they have no benefits and are paid much less than the jobs we once had. I’m luck that I have a job they have not figured out how to offshore and I have been well paid in the past. I am only down about 10-12% from my peak 10 years ago & that a lot better than most
becca
Koch Industries has been using Detroit as a garbage can for their toxic waste. Doing everything they can to be sure the city is good and royally fucked.
Seems buying up access to the waters of the Great Lakes is part of the master plan. Mucking about in WI, PA and OH.
I really really hope people see this for what it is… these guys are putsching their way across America.
And we are all such Good Germans about it.
Keith G
@IowaOldLady:
Sometimes cities have the types of leadership (political, business, and social) that can see over the horizon and make smaller adjustments before enormous one are necessary. I lived near Detroit once, and never got the impression that any of that leadership could grasp big picture needs.
becca
@becca: And FGL.
LanceThruster
Wall Street Bankers: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million displaced, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
Zifnab25
@Keith G: Hahaha. You’re not allowed to vote in Texas, unless you’ve been approved for voting by your local politburo, comrade.
Linnaeus
@Keith G:
I kinda doubt it. Pretty much everyone who could leave the city already has, and many of them have stayed in the metro area. I could see Detroit’s population bottoming out at around 500,000, but the out-migration wouldn’t be enough to have that much of an effect on the places they’d move to.
Mr Stagger Lee
RoboCop and They Live are two movies one can say predicted the 2010’s. Both from the 80’s.
Keith G
@Zifnab25: I take a glass half full approach. I am working on some proposals to take to local political and/or service organizations to put together (what I hope will be) county-wide efforts to guide and provide logistical help to those who need to get proper ID and then voter registration.
rikyrah
It’s a complete scam
Keith G
@Linnaeus: I take your point. I was speaking in more general terms. I am curious what the surrounding communities think of all this.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@ranchandsyrup: I’m a Michigander, born and bred in Grand Rapids, and you won’t hear me saying that.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
From what I’ve read, Detroit needs to shrink physically so services can be provided more efficiently. You can’t continue to support big areas with the resources they have. There’s not enough people any more.
PeakVT
Very unfortunate. Like most of the problems facing this nation, it could have been solved without too much difficulty if conservatives didn’t control various parts and layers of government.
Linnaeus
@Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937:
Another option – though it is highly unlikely – is consolidation with surrounding communities. In essence, the reverse of shrinking.
It’s also not necessarily clear what Detroit “shrinking” means. The land is still going to be there.
PeakVT
@Linnaeus: “Shrinking” in this context usually means bulldozing the few remaining houses in sparsely populated areas so that services (police, fire, street and sidewalk repair, streetlights, trash pickup, school bus service, etc.) don’t have to be provided. Of course, that costs money up front, and the displaced residents aren’t necessarily going to stay in the city.
j
@Linnaeus:
David in NY
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: My view exactly. The cities have been orphaned by the rest of the city-hating rural folks with undue influence in the legislatures.
I remember, 20 years ago or so, driving down the main street of Gary, Indiana. It looked like it had been totally abandoned in about 1962. The whole place sort of boarded up. I thought maybe an N-bomb had dropped there (you know, the one that kills people but doesn’t touch property). And nobody gave a damn.
And now Detroit, near where I grew up and briefly lived. Never quite the pleasant, attractive city center that other cities have, but great housing for middle-class people. Once upon a time.
As usual, I think race was the deep cause, that and the malfeasance of the American auto company management that hasn’t made a decent family sedan for three decades. But we’re Americans, don’t care what went wrong, just move on. A damn shame.
j
@Linnaeus:
Bingo! The “emergency manager” came up with a plan to loot the Detroit Institute of Arts and sell their collection to the lowest bidders.
So the 1% get millions of dollars of art for pennies on the dollar, and the citizens get shafted.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130526/ENT05/305260073/Detroit-Institute-of-Arts-and-bankruptcy
(Which was what I was going to post, but FYWP said “nay”.)
David in NY
@ranchandsyrup: That’s what they’ve probably been saying for decades, and it’s been no help.
David in NY
@Violet: “what’s going to happen to it”
Everybody’s going to forget about it. Like they’ve been doing for years.
The Other Bob
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You obviously have never been there. Do you get your imagery of Detroit only from Fox?
The Other Bob
@ranchandsyrup:
You need new friends.
signed, A Michigander.
Linnaeus
@PeakVT:
Oh, I get that. What I’m saying is that after you do those things, the land is obviously still there and still needs to be managed somehow. Or do you just keep it as some kind of quasi-frontier zone that’s officially part of the city, but that the city ignores? What happens then? Have you really solved the problem?
The Other Bob
Not that this will go anywhere, but a way to save a declining City is to offer immigrants who settle and stay there for a certain amount of time to earn US Citizenship. That would grow the population, fast.
Linnaeus
@The Other Bob:
There’s been talk of so-called “regional immigration”. If I’m not mistaken, Canada does something like that.
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
The fact that cities are refuges for people who’ve had it with living in the sticks and want something better probably doesn’t help, either. In addition to all These People, cities are filled with those who rejected the righties’ rural nirvana. I suspect at least for some rurals, that ads to the resentment.
Interestingly enough, if you go back far enough (medieval Europe) there are cities that were quite consciously designed that way. It was called the “free imperial city” model and would answer only to the Holy Roman Emperor – the landed aristocrats in surrounding areas had no authority over it. The idea was that those cities would serve as magnets for many of the peasants tired of living under these lords, which would weaken their support base and force them to be more amicable towards the Imperial throne.
pharniel
@Linnaeus:
Look at a map of Detroit – preferably one that has shaded boxes for shapes and you’ll see that the city isn’t actually a coherent mass – Much like the towns in phoenix there’s random spurs and trails of land that Detroit annexed way back when that really should be a separate town these days.
So step 1 – reduce Detroit to its actual supportable enviorns.
Step 2 – The now unincorporated lands become townships or actual towns again – which means they have local control either way.
Done – there’s been a great deal of young white urbinintes moving back into Detroit – they’re bohemian in the extreme though. But still if anyone has the right ‘moxie’ (a/k/a racial makeup) to stay the governor’s hand it’s the wealthy families that have been buying up downtown like crazy and The Kids moving in to farm and the like.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
And this has been at the core of the city’s problems going back to the point in the 1950s when the population began to decline. Decades of expansion of the city borders, decades of expansion of roads, street lights, sewers and water lines…Then decades of putting the costs of upkeep on fewer and fewer shoulders.
Funny thing is that the population of metro Detroit had- up until the last decade- grown as the population of the city proper had plummeted. The people bitching the loudest about the city’s problems have been the same people who created the problem by moving to the ‘burbs.
Sherlock Hound
@ArchTeryx:
The Robocop franchise had a short-lived TV series.
It was awesome! It preserved Verhoeven’s take on Detroit. It was a cop show that had an episode on welfare reform, featuring, but of course, a private-sector provider and very, very corrupt, too.
It had Commander Cash, a cartoon character who did PSA’s for “human test volunteers”, since animal testing was banned in Delta City’s time. The Commander also sold a hand grenade in his likeness, for the safety of your children. Not to mention “Sterettes” which were OTC steroids!
(Years later, I still laugh my ass off hearing Cash’s disclaimer, “Warning: May cause abrupt mood swings! Discontinue use if blood appears in urine.”)
I loved that show.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@The Other Bob:
This!
-Another Michigander
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Chris:
Except that it wasn’t a fact when Detroit was growing. People migrated there because there was too little land to farm back home, wherever those homes had been. Economic necessity far outweighed aesthetic considerations as the motivating factor to move to the city in the first half of the last century.
goblue72
@efgoldman: San Francisco…New York…Seattle…
bad dad
Depends on the bankruptcy judge. We have one of the finest water systems in the country. If it’s privatized and our rates double to because it’s now for-profit, FTS.
The art in the DIA will be interesting. The tri-county area recently passed a millage to help fund the museum and take that burden from the Detroit taxpayers. I think they have a valid claim to an equity stake there and should be able to keep the DIA from the wolves.
The Republicans in the State of Michigan have been on a 30 year plan to destroy municipalities, school systems and public employees in general. First, we had the Headlee amendment, which forbid property taxes from rising faster than inflation. Then we had Proposal A, which raised the sales tax to 6% from 4% and reduced property taxes. The state then took over the centralized funding of the schools and have been starving them ever since. School districts are going bankrupt, yet we just did away with business income taxes for everyone but C corporations. The state is even running a surplus right now. Are they sending it back to the schools and cities? Nope. And don’t even get me started on charter schools…
The ONLY good thing that will come from this crash and burn strategy is the consolidation of cities and school districts. There’s no reason for Dearborn Heights to have 4 school districts. Hell, at this point there’s no reason for Dearborn Heights. Merge it with Dearborn.
The original grid for the State of Michgan had 6 mile by 6 mile square townships. Around Detroit, these should become the new city boundaries. Merge Wayne, Westland, Garden City and Inkster. Merge Trenton, Wyandotte, Woodhaven and Brownstown Township. And their school districts. We can no longer afford the luxury of 30,000 resident suburbs or 1,000 kid school districts, each with their own police chief, fire chief or superintendent.
Me rambling. Night, night.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@pharniel: The city has been talking about doing just that for the past few years, but being bankrupt, they lack the resources to actually execute the plan.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@goblue72: Actually Bloomberg ran as a Republican. I like to remind my Faux News fan friends of that whenever they start bitching about how he – like all liberals – wants to control people’s lives.
jake the snake
@BGinCHI:
Verhoeven directed three films in Holland that are considered among the best in Dutch film history. You can argue
that the Dutch don’t have that impressive a film history, but Verhoeven is probably their best film-maker ever.
“Turkish Delight”, Soldier of Orange”, and “Black Book”.
jake the snake
@Keith:
Do you know the source of that line?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Someone associated with Robocop obviously was familiar with The Marching Morons, as was Mike Judge.
jwest
Based on the way Michigan funds it’s schools, Detroit’s comeback may lie in the total elimination of traditional public schools.
If the state and the new city management allowed for a pure educational voucher given to the parent of each child, hundreds of thousands of families would look for a way to make a home inside the city. Whole neighborhoods would be bought up instantly while poorer, black residents would be economically pushed to outer suburbs.
The advent of a free market based, for profit opportunity system for education is the stimulus that Detroit needs.
Ramalama
Back when I mingled freely with scientists, I heard talk (maybe 2 years ago?) that Abu Dhabi was considering plunking down a chunk of change to invest in Detroit to make it an environmentally green city. Huge Arab-American population there. Or there was.
BruceJ
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
“There may not be much to do save to burn it, bulldoze it, and walk away.”
Are you advocating doing this while the residents are sleeping in their beds, or do you intend to drive them out at bayonet-point first?
Phoenix Woman
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: In fact, Detroit’s lily-white suburbs are quite affluent — Oakland County is one of the ten richest in the nation. Why are they so rich while Detroit isn’t? It’s how Michigan’s property tax system is set up to pretty much screw anyone who’s not already white or rich.
justinb
Mobile site please
Andrew
@pharniel: The bulk of the people moving back downtown aren’t bohemian at all. It’s primarily standard young people, but the artist community makes for more interesting newspaper stories.