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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Thanks Think Progress
Rush Limbaugh: Detroit Went Bankrupt Because Blacks Drove Out Whites
By Igor Volsky and Alan Pyke on July 31, 2013 at 1:12 pm
greta_rush_073013
Economists are attributing Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing to problems facing the entire Rust Belt region: a shrinking tax base, high health and pension costs, sprawl, and general dysfunction. But on Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh added another cause to the long list of factors that have contributed to the city’s downfall: black people.
During an appearance on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday, Limbaugh claimed that “unchecked” Democratic rule “since the last Republican mayor [in] 1957″ created a lazy and bloated culture of out-of-control spending and corruption.
“You’ve had that — that town has been a petri dish of everything the Democrat Party stands for, everything the Democrat Party loves — massive unions, massive pensions, pay people pensions and health care long after they’ve stopped working,” he said, before arguing that the city’s first black mayor exacerbated the city’s spending and sparked racial riots that chased white people into the suburbs:
LIMBAUGH: You have massive welfare states where citizens are given things left and right in order to buy their votes. You have no opposition whatsoever.
And in the case of the — you throw race into the mix and you bring on Mayor Coleman Young who causes riots in 1967 in Detroit and Mayor Young caused a white flight to suburbia, and Detroit is left with nothing but liberal Democrats running it. It is what it is. And you — any place in this country that has similar circumstances, the same fate is going to happen to them.
First, Coleman Young, who Limbaugh claims caused the riots, wasn’t elected to the mayor’s office until six years after violence broke out, in 1973. The New York Times noted in his obituary that by that point, “Detroit had already been reeling from high unemployment in the automobile industry, a high crime rate and deteriorating housing.” Young also wasn’t a proponent of the kind of welfare policies and “massive pensions,” that Limbaugh attributes to Democrats. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was actually credited with keeping Detroit financially afloat “by persuading city workers to accept cuts in salaries and fringe benefits and voters to approve a $96 million increase in income taxes.” In the late 1990s, the city, still under Democratic rule, even experienced a small revitalization. Household incomes rose, child poverty dropped “by a stunning 13 percentage points,” and homeownership grew.
As for the 1967 riots, they occurred in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, when African Americans across the country were, as a study commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson put it, systematically excluded from the benefits of economic progress and faced “Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing.” The report, which focused on the causes of the violence, found that “white racism,” not Coleman Young, “is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”
The riots of the late 1960s set off “a chain reaction in neighboring communities.” The violence first started in Newark, New Jersey in July of 1967 and later spread to Detroit. “What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens,” the 1967 National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders concluded. “Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.”
Limbaugh is right that white people did leave Detroit in large numbers in the aftermath of the 1967 violence, but that exodus followed a trend of whites abandoning cities as black people moved in and a slowdown in the auto industry. Before the riots, the vast majority of white population growth was already occurring “in suburban portions of metropolitan areas” and white population within the city of Detroit had declined by 1.3 million between 1960 and 1967.
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Wed Jul 31, 2013 9:20 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Leading Conservative: Detroit Went Bankrupt Because Blacks Drove Out Whites
thinkprogress.org
The city's first black mayor exacerbated Detroit's spending and sparked racial riots |
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Wed Jul 31, 2013 9:22 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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See Huffington Post Detroit for more stories
Detroit Is Bankrupt, But Receives Less Federal Government Aid Than ...
Detroit Is Bankrupt, But Receives Less Federal Government Aid Than Colombia
The Huffington Post10 hours ago
Jul 31, 2013 · ... a professor at Columbia University in New York, ... Related News On Huffington Post: ... Bankrupt Detroit Receives Less U.S. Aid Than …
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Detroit Is Bankrupt, But Receives Less Federal Government Aid Than Colombia
Posted: 07/31/2013 4:17 pm EDT | Updated: 07/31/2013 4:23 pm ED
Detroit may be bankrupt, but more federal aid dollars are set to go to the country of Colombia than to America's 18th-largest city next year, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg reports that the South American nation will receive almost $323 million through President Barack Obama's new proposal to fight drug trafficking and violence. A State Department memo cited by the report says three-quarters of the money will be used to maintain "peace and security" in Colombia.
Conversely, Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy almost two weeks ago with at least $18 billion in long-term debt, will receive just $108.2 million in funds from the U.S. government in 2014, according to Bloomberg. Some $33 million of that total award is funded by a Community Block Grant distributed each year to urban cities and counties.
Detroit's murder rate is nearly twice as high as Colombia's, increasing 10 percent in 2012 to 53 murders for every 100,000 residents -- second only to New Orleans among U.S. cities. Despite that sobering fact, the Detroit Police Department is currently eligible to receive just $2 million in funds next year from the feds.
Colombia isn't the only country set to receive more aid under Obama's 2014 foreign assistance budget than Detroit, according to ForeignAssistance.gov, a website created by the U.S. Department of State. Leading the way in aid received is Afghanistan, which will get almost $2.2 billion in foreign aid. Other countries receiving more federal assistance than Detroit in 2014 include Egypt ($1.5 billion), South Africa ($445 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($235 million), Mexico ($205 million), the Philippines ($187 million) and Indonesia ($182 million).
The Obama Administration has made no moves suggesting a federal bailout of Detroit is a possibility. Left in the hands of a bankruptcy judge, pensions promised to more than 21,000 city government retirees face cuts, along with health care for current and retired workers, active worker pensions and payments owed to bondholders.
Robert Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a former chief economist of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, cited the gap between aid for Colombia and Detroit on a call with reporters Wednesday to argue that Washington must change the way it funds and helps urban areas like Detroit.
"Obviously many people are demoralized in the United States now because they see that we don't help our cities, because that's not a systemic risk," he said.
Also on the call Wednesday was Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York, who pointed to suburbanization and instability as destroyers of Detroit's finances. He said the lowered quality of services, public safety and education available to Americans in cities creates a fragmentation that wields "a gross effect on our society."
"Our approach has been: let everybody fend for themselves," Stiglitz said of the federal government's unwillingness to fix urban problems. "The consequence of that is just a huge waste of human and fiscal resources that would have been far better [used] to try to preserve the assets that are in Detroit ... better than basically [letting] the city decay as jobs decrease by more than 50 percent."
A federal bailout of Detroit would be unusual, but by no means the first -- New York City was bailed out under President Gerald Ford in 1975 to the tune of $2.3 billion (or $9.9 billion in today's dollars). Of course, more recently, federal bailouts have become more common for corporations than for cities. Domestic automakers General Motors and Chrysler received $80 billion in loans from the federal government beginning in 2008.
"We do help our auto companies -- some of which are headquartered in Detroit -- which have plants in Mexico and China and all around the world," Johnson said. But while some analysts credit the bailout of Chrysler and GM for saving 1 million jobs, many of those benefits didn't trickle down to Detroiters. "What works out to the benefit of General Motors or Chrysler does not work out to the benefit of these communities," Johnson said.
Facing down a recession, the federal government also invested over $700 billion in troubled banks and financial companies through The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), more commonly known as the Wall Street bailout.
Johnson said the sort of financial protection and help that has been extended to Wall Street, foreign nations like Colombia, and other multinational companies should also be available to ordinary Americans.
"The real question is, once again," he said, "who is in and who is out of the kind of guarantees and assurance that our society provides."
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Wed Jul 31, 2013 9:51 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Despite promises made years ago on revenue sharing in return for communities giving up specific business taxes to the state, the state continues to renege on the amount of revenue sharing sent to urban areas which exacerbates the worsening financial urban crises.
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Thu Aug 01, 2013 6:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Wed Jul 31, 2013 10:16 pm |
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pan8
F L I N T O I D
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So when does Detroit get the "Hope and Change" obama promised? Liberal ideology and policies destroyed Detroit.
Pan8 |
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Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:22 am |
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