Detroit: Bankrupt Black City to Pay Reparations to Itself

By Daniel Greenfield May 07, 2023 @ Sultan Knish  Blog 

While the eyes of the nation are on San Francisco’s proposal to pay every black person $5 million in reparations for an estimated total cost of $175 billion, Motor City won’t be left behind.

Last year, 80% of Detroit voters in a 78% black city cast their ballots in support of a reparations commission. That was much higher than 63% poll numbers but local election results tend to outperform the polls due to the civic work of the Wayne County Cemetery Voters Association.

Chairwoman Lauren Hood of the Detroit City Planning Commission said that she didn’t know who the 20% were, but assumed it was maybe newcomers to the city or non-black residents.

But with a 78% black majority, Detroit would be taking money from black people to pay reparations to other black people with the government, run by a white mayor, taking a cut.

“Detroit is the blackest big city in the nation. Eight out of every 10 people here are due some sort of reparation,” Chairwoman Hood argued. “Can you imagine how the landscape of the city might change socially, economically, spiritually, if we actually get what we’re owed?”

If 8 out of 10 people are due reparations, whom does Hood see paying them? The other 2? And what happens if the other 2 leave?

A decade ago, Detroit fell into the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Millions are being spent to tear down thousands of homes after the city’s population plunged from 1.8 million in 1950 to just 639,111 today. When the last census showed that another 7,150 people had fled, Detroit sued the Census Bureau claiming that its numbers were “divorced from reality”.

Reality actually took out a restraining order against Detroit in the 1980s. And the city and state have made it clear that they won’t even speak to reality until it pays reparations.

The current plan to revive the population is to “attract new residents from states less protective of the LGBTQ+ community and with more restrictive abortion access.”

And when all those abortion-loving transgender folks show up, they can pay reparations.

This replaces a previous proposal headlined in a New York Times op-ed as “Let Syrians Settle Detroit” to bring Islamists fighting a civil war to resettle the city. They’re bound to get along well with the LGBTQ activists and abortion un-moms who can all happily pay reparations together.

Reparations got off to a slow start when the “virtual meeting was hacked several times with displays of explicit content, including images of pornography”.

Detroit was not even functional enough to run a Zoom meeting, let alone distribute reparations from black people to other black people in a city where the most popular crime is copper theft.

Slavery had been banned in Michigan since 1787 by the Confederation Congress almost as soon as the United States came into existence. Before then there had been 170 slaves in Detroit. Tracking down the descendants of those 170 slaves from almost 250 years ago would be an interesting exercise. Not that Detroit is planning to limit reparations to those slaves.

One major problem with reparations is that Detroit doesn’t have the money. There’s another group that has a much more solid legal claim to the failed city’s cash. After it went bankrupt in 2013, Detroit’s recovery was only enabled by the crooked mechanism of declaring a 10-year pension ‘holiday’. The holiday ends in 2023. Detroit politicians kept claiming that they had a $100 million annual surplus, because they were not making $163 million in pension payments.

With the 20-year pension payment plan due, Detroit went to court to ask for a 30-year plan so that it could postpone until 2033.

Worse still, the actual liabilities were $500 million more than the numbers on the books.

Detroit’s political class had three options, make payments they could not afford, go bankrupt again or use a reparations commission to change the subject from all the money it owed to 12,000 retired cops, firefighters and EMTs. What reparations really means is stealing pensions from city retirees who had risked their lives for decades to fund teardowns of more buildings.

And then maybe all the transgender Syrian Muslim refugees seeking abortions will come.

Much like in San Francisco, no one is sure where the reparations money for 8 out of 10 Detroit residents will come from. The only idea that has emerged so far has been to legalize drugs and use the money for reparations. And even the idea of selling drugs to black people and then giving them a percentage of the drug money ran into trouble when its attempt to limit drug licenses to longtime residents was found to be illegal. While drug sales have since been legalized, who in Detroit is even going to buy enough legal drugs to finance reparations?

Black folks in Detroit need to be compensated,” Cecily McClellan, a member of the commission, declared.

“I would like to use this opportunity to make one thing abundantly clear this work is not about handouts,” City Council President Mary Sheffield ranted. “It is about creating generational wealth and creating economic mobility and opportunity in the black community as we stand just mere blocks from the former home of the mother of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks.”

Rosa Parks was mugged in her own home when a thug broke in, demanded money, and punched the 81-year-old former civil rights activist in the face. It was the 90s, a saner time, and so the George Floyd wannabe was arrested and sent away for 8 years.

Parks is dead and so is Detroit.

The good news is that Detroit’s population continues to decline. Black people have joined white people in getting out. The city suffered the largest loss of black residents of any in the country. The schools are the worst in the nation, the water is tainted and crime is out of control.

But the reparations commission has a $350,000 budget so at least someone is getting paid.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.

 

Chicago’s Downward Spiral

January 10, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

It’s not easy to identify America’s worst-governed city. You can make a case for jurisdictions such as San Francisco, Detroit, New York City, Minneapolis, or Seattle.

 

For what it’s worth, there is statistical research from last decade showing places like New York and Los Angeles are among the worst of the worst, but I wonder if Chicago actually deserves top billing

There are many reasons to criticize the Windy City. Crime is rampant, taxes are excessive, and schools are terrible.

And, to make matters worse, Chicago is in America’s worst-governed state (at least based on my poll, which is not scientific but is probably accurate).

I already wrote once about bad public policy in Chicago. Today’s column is going to show that things are getting even worse.

I’ve written about how taxpayers are fleeing poorly governed states. Well, they’re also fleeing poorly governed cities. And the AP reports that Chicago is a popular place for companies…to leave.

The Chicago area saw an exodus of corporate headquarters in 2022, including investment firm Citadel, which moved to Miami along with its billionaire founder, Ken Griffin; Caterpillar, which relocated from north suburban Deerfield to Irving, Texas; and aerospace giant Boeing, which moved to Arlington, Virginia, after more than 20 years in the West Loop. The most recent high-profile departure was announced in November, when Lake Forest-based auto parts manufacturer Tenneco said it was shifting its headquarters to Michigan. …vacancy rates in the central business district rose to 19.6%, while the Chicago metro ticked up to 21.8%… Meanwhile, Citadel principals and employees generated billions of dollars in tax revenue for the city and state over the past decade, according to the firm, money that has also headed south.

And why are businesses escaping?

As Adam Schuster explained last October in National Review, the city’s economic management is getting worse.

Can anything be done to save the financial future of one of America’s largest and best cities? …Let’s go through the numbers. The business community is right that a property-tax increase is unnecessary considering the $3.5 billion in pandemic-related federal aid. ..The property-tax hike could be prevented by using just 2.5 percent of Chicago’s $1.9 billion in American Rescue Plan funding. But instead of using the aid to prevent tax hikes that would impede Chicago’s economic recovery, the city has proposed to use those billions to create new programs. The mayor’s proposed budget increases spending by roughly $1.2 billion… Unfortunately, that spending is propped up by one-time federal aid that expires by 2024 — meaning many programs will have to be…financed with significant tax hikes within just two years. And about those pensions: Pension costs will consume more than $2.3 billion of the city’s budget, or 21.4 percent of its own source revenue, excluding state and federal grants. That’s more than a $967 million increase in pension spending since Lightfoot became mayor and $461 million more than last year alone.

In other words, the city is trying to raise taxes today while also making decisions (especially regarding unfunded pensions) that will almost surely mean additional tax increases in the future.

No wonder people and business are fleeing the state and the city.

P.S. To make matters worse, Chicago still has major problems with corruption.

P.P.S. My long-run fear is that politicians in DC will provide bailouts for profligate cities and states.

Shock Video: Detroit Election Workers Trained To Kick Out Poll Watchers, Count Challenged Ballots, Throw Out Provisional Ballots

By Brock Simmons  October 24, 2020 252 Comments    

Hidden audio has emerged from an anonymous source who took the election work training classes in Detroit, Michigan.  And you won’t believe what the trainers are instructing the poll workers to do.

The audio, posted in a video on YouTube, reveals that election workers are trained to try to kick out poll watchers and anyone who challenges any ballot. “They have to wear a mask, and they have to stay six feet. That’s important because if you don’t have six feet, they can’t come back there,” advises the instructor, who then goes on to say that a person standing six feet away from the ballots cannot accurately see what is going on and can’t verify any signatures, “Unless they got really good vision or they brought their binoculars.”

Trainees are told that the number one thing people will scrutinize are the absentee ballots. The solution to someone challenging an absentee ballot?..........To Read More......

Joe Biden: ‘We Have Put Together the Most Extensive Voter Fraud Organization in History’ (VIDEO))

By Cassandra FairbanksOctober 24, 2020 417 Comments

  

In either one of Joe Biden’s signature gaffes, or a really terrible Freudian slip, former Vice President Joe Biden asserted that they have put together the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”

“We have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama’s administration before this, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” Biden said during a virtual Get Out the Vote event.........More Here......

 

 

 

How Detroit's Police Chief Saved His City from Black Lives Matter

September 14, 2020 By T.R. Clancy

Detroit Will Breathe, the Motor City's BLM franchisee, won a hollow victory last week when a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that bars Detroit police from using certain non-lethal tactics on "peaceful protesters."

Detroit police chief James Craig responded to the TRO with a shrug.  It changes nothing, he told reporters, because that's how his department always handles peaceful protesters.  "Every time we've had to use less-than-lethal force, it's been to address violence by protesters, resisting arrest, or when they've tried to take over an intersection in violation of the law."

Compared to the conflagrations BLM has incited in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and even Kenosha, Detroit Will Breathe has been an epic flop.  Drawing mostly small crowds and desperate for media attention, DWB's been stifled from the get-go by Chief Craig's zero-tolerance approach to thugs and looters posing as demonstrators.

The first three nights after George Floyd's death, when radicals — most from out of town and some armed with bricks and railroad spikes — ignored a curfew and tried to turn the city into another Minneapolis, Detroit police pushed back hard, using tear gas and making over 140 arrests.  That quieted things.  A few days later, Detroit Will Breathe somehow finagled a meeting with Mayor Mike Duggan and Chief Craig to lay out their list of demands, like "demilitarizing the police" and making Detroit a sanctuary city.  Group organizer and Keeper of the Bullhorn Tristan Taylor felt cocky enough to brag to reporters that the meeting "was on our terms" because "[t]he movement is strong."  But not strong enough to mau-mau Duggan and Craig, who nodded pleasantly and then lost their copies of the list........

A few weeks ago, bored with peacefully marching all over without a news crew in sight, DWB decided to try occupying a major downtown intersection.  After an hour of demonstrators defying orders to disperse, police moved in and arrested 44 DWB members, encountering the predictable violent resistance.  When the inevitable hue and cry was raised over how rough some of the arrests were ("I've never seen a use of force that looks good," Craig remarked), the chief stood his ground.  "I am not going to let any group set up a Seattle zone of lawlessness here in the city of Detroit," Craig said.  "That is non-negotiable."........."Detroit Will Breathe, you are not welcome. Go." ........To Read More...

Examiner Editorial: Detroit bankruptcy ruling clears way for pension cuts

The Motor City has an estimated $18 billion in debt and cannot reliably provide even basic...

By Editorial Writer | DECEMBER 4, 2013

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled Tuesday that Detroit is indeed bankrupt and can proceed with its Chapter 9 filing. The facts in the case gave him no grounds on which to rule otherwise: The Motor City has an estimated $18 billion in debt and cannot reliably provide even basic services to its residents. Rhodes might as well have declared that the earth was round and the sun rises in the east.

Nevertheless, the lead-up to the decision was fairly suspenseful given that it involved a significant legal precedent: whether federal law has supremacy over state law in bankruptcy matters. The Michigan constitution includes a provision that explicitly forbids trimming state and local government employee pension benefits, as the city is seeking to do under bankruptcy. Most legal experts believed that federal law trumped state law but the issue had been untested in court…..To Read More…..

For Paul Krugman, Everything’s An Exception

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) | July 24th, 2013

The failure of Detroit is only the latest dramatic illustration of the practical failure of liberal-progressivism, standing in contrast to the great successes of free markets and conservative governance. If you are Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist, this sort of thing ought to give you pause about the connection between your big-government ideas and reality. Instead, it is only the latest example of how Krugman simply writes off any facts he finds inconvenient.

• Walter Olson at Cato notes Krugman’s response to Detroit’s bankruptcy

There are influential people out there who would like you to believe that Detroit’s demise is fundamentally a tale of fiscal irresponsibility and/or greedy public employees. It isn’t. For the most part, it’s just one of those things that happens now and then in an ever-changing economy.

This at least is less egregiously dishonest than the chorus of left-wingers engaged in arguing that Detroit was done in by conservative racists rather than the actions of its own wholly Democratic, wholly liberal government and population over the past six decades (with a big assist from the State of Michigan, which has been far more often in liberal Democratic than conservative Republican hands over those years – think Jennifer Granholm – in large part due to the voting power of Detroit). But it’s also sadly symptomatic of how Krugman deals with contrary examples....To Read More....

My Take - For many years I have attended conferences for the pest control industry, including a few National Pest Management Legislative Day conferences in Washington.  I never cease to be amazed at the stupid things said by "experts" they have brought it.   Especially those brought in to talk about the economy.  But it doesn't stop there.

Whether it's Integrated Pest Management, Green Pest Control, government regulations or a host of things I almost want to jump up and say....."You're wrong and I'm going to tell you why!"  I think the thing  that drives me the most crazy is I never get podium time.  

I have yet to have one person in leadership say to me...."We don't let you speak because you're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about!"  If they did, then at least we could have a basis for debate....which I have asked for on more than one occasion.  

I have even asked the trade journals to set up such an event to no avail.  Why?  

What interests me the most is what is the foundational standard they have for choosing writers, articles, speakers and subjects to be discussed.....and why?   One person told me outright they would not discuss their policies on this with me.  Why?  Of course, I suppose they may think that I will eventually go away.....but I thought they all knew I'm Serbian!

 

Could France succeed where Detroit has failed?

July 23, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

Hmm. Does any of this sound at all familiar?

President Francois Hollande may only manage a lightweight reform of France’s indebted pension system, with trade unions preparing street protests and his own Socialist Party warning it would oppose painful measures.

Fellow Europeans say France risks damaging its own standing and that of the euro zone among investors, and upsetting southern members struggling with harsh reforms, if it fails to address the deficit in its pension funding.

But left-wing lawmakers are determined to prevent any erosion in the old-age provision enjoyed by the French. …

Yet the fact that pensions are almost entirely borne by the state means public spending on pensions is 14.4 per cent of output versus 12.9 per cent in the EU.

The pension pot has been depleted by rising unemployment and without reform, the funding gap will balloon from 14 billion euros (HK$143 billion) currently to 20 billion euros by 2020.

Much like the recently and officially bankrupt city of Detroit, France and its explicitly Socialist leadership are struggling to find a way out from underneath the crushing fiscal burden of much too much government spending and extravagantly underfunded pensions, and their politics are largely dominated by ultra-liberals and big labor to the degree that putting the country on the long-term path to fiscal sustainability isn’t really on the radar. Hollande’s big goal at the moment is to push through just enough reform so that they won’t have to address the problem again until 2020… but what happens after that? And what about all of the additional debt they’ll be wracking up in the interval?....To Read More……

My Take – Six things. First; France is going to go broke.....soon. That's it, get over it! Secondly; the EU will dissolve, either officially or in reality when France, or any other EU country, defaults. Third; the French are attacking the very institutions that funded them, and as a result that source will dry up entirely. When that happens they will be unable to pay for anything and anarchy will ensue, and it is my belief that an even more restrictive form of socialism will take over. Fourth; violence will spread throughout France to such a degree that it will become another Syria, and much of the violence will be directed against Muslims. Fifth; that will spread throughout Europe and after that…. well…..who knows for sure, but I do believe we will be seeing a worldwide battle between the Muslims and everyone else. Sixth; there will be a massive drive to end the violence by creating a worldwide government under the auspices of the United Nations, and that will so destructive economically, philosophically and morally they will bankrupt the world.

Then the violence will really begin.

I am not optimistic! Why?  Because the world has abandoned Judaic/Christian values and principles in favor of socialist worship of the state. Now the world has no moral foundation for its actions other than the philosophical flavor of the day.  And the world has gone mad.

On Detroit Bankruptcy, All Three Networks Skip the Sky High Taxes, Dem Control for 50 Years

Years By Scott Whitlock | July 19, 2013

All three networks on Thursday night and Friday morning avoided key factors in the bankruptcy of Detroit, skipping the city's astronomically high tax rate and ignoring Democratic dominance for the previous half century. (Detroit's last Republican mayor left office in 1962.) Instead, ABC, NBC and CBS acted as though the bankruptcy, what Brian Williams called "the slow-moving tragedy of decline," was something that just happened.

On Good Morning America, Betty Liu gently summarized, "What happened here? Well, people have been leaving the city for years. Back in the 1950s, you had almost two million people, at the peak, living in Detroit. Now, just 700,000. So they've lost half their population." She added, "When you have fewer people living in the city, you're collecting less income and property taxes." Why are people fleeing the city? Lacking curiosity, Liu didn't bring that point up.....To Read More....

Heartland Institute Experts React to Detroit Bankruptcy

By Jim Lakely July 19, 2013

The city of Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history Thursday afternoon. Gov. Rick Snyder (R) filed the 16-page Chapter 9 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit.

The following statements from budget and tax experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution.

“Intransigent police, firefighter, and teacher unions delivered the final, death blow to the city of Detroit. But other major cities have been able to deal with such intransigence without having to resort to bankruptcy. What ultimately killed Detroit was its culture of dependence and victimization – the same culture that elected and re-elected our President and which threatens to destroy the entire nation. The city always and invariably blames its shortcomings on everyone but themselves – on inadequate federal and state subsidies and on the “racism” of those who identify, quite correctly, those policies as the cause, rather than the solution for the cities’ downward spiral....To Read More....

 

Exclusive--Rand Paul: Obama Will Bail out Detroit 'Over My Dead Body'

By Matthew Boyle19 Jul 2013

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he will use every resource he has at his disposal to stop President Barack Obama from bailing out newly-bankrupt Detroit because he believes the city can and must save itself and learn from its fiscal mistakes. "I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don’t have any money in Washington.”

“There’s some good things that come out of bankruptcy,” Paul said in a phone interview from Iowa. “One is you get to start over. Bankruptcy lets you be forgiven of your debt. And you do so by getting new management, better management, and by getting rid of unwieldy contracts, contracts that give you where public employees are getting paid twice what private employees are and things come back more to normal. That’s the way cities and businesses can recover.

"I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don’t have any money in Washington.”

The White House said it is monitoring the situation in Detroit,....[and] Obama’s former auto czar Steven Rattner said on MSNBC on Friday that he is calling on Obama to bail out Detroit. Paul said that "apparently" Obama is "making indications that Detroit can be expected to be bailed out."......that will send a signal to the rest of cities and states nationwide that the federal government will bail them out to if they conduct reckless spending. ...To Read More.....

Detroit. Bankrupt.

Rich Galen July 19, 2013