Detroit Mayor David Bing to ask for $150 million in aid; Detroit's Received More Than a Trillion in Aid Since the Inception of Black-Rule in 1973

“Detroit, the place where capitalism failed.”

63 Alfred Street: Built by white people 130 plus years ago

This quote comes from the book 63 Alfred Street: Where Capitalism Failed by John Kossik, which blames the failures on Detroit for the inability of capitalism to work in a city where the immutable laws of the Visible Black of Economics have been at work for decades.

Kossik focuses his thesis on the tragic ruins of a Venetian Gothic mansion, built more than 130 years ago when white people were more than 99 percent of population there.

Capitalism didn’t fail Detroit, for it is capitalism that has allowed the lily-white suburbs to thrive, courtesy of the ingenuity of the people living there to innovate and produce something of wealth and value. Their labor is rewarded; in Detroit, the exact opposite is on display, courtesy of the Black population (89 percent of the city) found there.

Though it is not formal yet, Detroit’s beleaguered mayor is going to do what the first Black mayor of Detroit – Coleman Young – did so well: beg, plead, and pray for federal grants, federal aid, and or a loan to help keep the city moving forward. The Detroit News reported:

Mayor Dave Bing is seeking $125 million to $150 million in a short-term loan from the state to help fix the city's fiscal crisis, Bing's office confirmed Thursday night. 

Bing's request follows his State of the City speech Wednesday night where he vowed to keep an emergency manager out of the city and called for "tangible support" from the state, including financial and operational support.

 To stave off the collapse of the city – the Detroit School System has already been taken over by the state, a system that spends $15,000+ per pupil but produces the lowest big city standardized test scores in all of America and a population that is nearly 50 percent illiterate – and the implementation of an emergency manager to assume control of the city’s finances, Mayor Bing is resorting to playing the role Coleman Young made famous: Demand more money, and have absolute no return on investment to show for the federal aid, federal grant, or money borrowed to help Detroit move forward.

Same building today: Neglected under Black-rule in Detroit

Wilbur Rich’s book Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker was basically a running apology for the mismanagement of federal aid that Young was able to convince the government to keep sending Detroit’s way.

Between 2009 – 2011 alone, Detroit Public Schools snagged $200 million in federal stimulus money (the largest amount given to any school system in the state of Michigan). The test scores and graduation rate produced by these Black scholars (96 percent of the K-12 student body in Detroit is Black) didn’t magically go up, though the drop-out rate did. Worse, Wayne County – home to Detroit – received a total of $2.4 billion in stimulus dollars between that same time.

Where did that money go?

The same place that the $11 million grant to help low-income job seekers enrich their wardrobes with appropriate attire for interviews (of which only two people were helped). The same place where the $50 million that is sent each year by the federal government for Head Start went:

Following complaints that the Detroit Human Services Department fostered an environment of nepotism, reckless spending and corruption to the detriment of the early childhood education program Head Start, the federal government plans to stop sending $50 million a year to the city to fund the program, the Free Press learned Thursday.

Head Start has been declared a failure, by the way. Meaning that the $50 million given to Detroit each year for more than 30 years has been a monumental waste of taxpayer money.

In July of 2011, the Detroit Free Press reported on another city department mismanaging $75 million in federal funds:

The FBI is investigating the city's Human Services Department over misspent tax dollars and its handling of $100 million in federal grants.There's been a continuing police investigation into how the city's Department of Health and Wellness Promotion has handled about $75 million in state and federal funds. And Detroit Mayor Dave Bing fired the department's director, Yvonne Anthony, in May. 

More than 25 of Bing's top appointees have left the city in the last two years, and Bing has pleaded with Detroit's corporate community to be more active in helping to revitalize the city.

Federal grants are needed to keep the police on the streets, even though they’ve stopped responding to 911 calls; federal grants are needed to keep firefighters employed. Indeed, federal grants to the tune of millions of dollars are even needed to keep neighborhoods stabilized, though no evidence for stability exists.

There is no tax-base in Detroit anymore. The wealth producers (i.e. white people) fled when the threat of criminality – almost entirely by Black people – became too great in the late 1960s.  Those Black people who are in the middle-to-upper-middle class in Detroit are there because of intense affirmative action in the city’s government (and in the distribution of contracts to private contractors).

Fitting that Lyndon B. Johnson designated Detroit a “Model City” in the early 1960s, where hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into The Motor City to help alleviate poverty and help the growing Black population get off their knees and onto their feet.

By helping them on their knees with hundreds of millions of aid, Detroit’s progressive white Mayor Jerry Cavanagh could only watch in horror as Black people engaged in the most destructive riot in American history, burning significant parts of the city, helping convince hundreds of thousands of white people to move into the suburbs immediately.  The New York Times reported in 1997, 30 years after those devastating riots that Detroit never recovered from, that the misery of Black-rule in Detroit was still better than what they had rioted against:

There were nearly four dozen riots and more than 100 smaller cases of civil unrest in the United States in 1967, but Detroit's riots were the deadliest. A Presidential commission later attributed most of the 43 deaths to police officers and National Guardsmen who, in the commission's view, had gone out of control.The long-simmering anger of black residents at an abusive, mostly white police force erupted here in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, and lasted five days. The flash point was a raid by white police officers on an after-hours drinking and gambling club at the corner of 12th and Clairmount Streets, in a heavily black neighborhood. By the time the smoke cleared almost a week later, 683 buildings across the city had been damaged or destroyed and tanks had rolled through the streets. But the riots exacerbated demographic shifts that had begun a decade before in many big cities. Around 1940, many Southern blacks, like various immigrant groups before them, moved to Detroit for the work in the automobile factories. The city's population at the time of the riots was one-third black, and by 1990 that percentage had grown to 76 percent.Even before the riots, many middle-class Detroit residents, particularly whites, had begun moving to the newly built suburbs, commuting to work on the broad highways being built. But the riots turned the steady stream of people moving to the suburbs into a torrent. Businesses followed their customers. Thousands of houses were abandoned as the city's population plunged to 992,000 from 1.6 million at the time of the riots. Even today, some black residents refer to the upheaval here 30 years ago as a rebellion against racist white authority rather than a riot. The site where the troubles began, 12th Street, was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1976, after the civil rights heroine from Montgomery, Ala., who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and who later moved to Detroit.

What happened in Detroit is a strangely mirrors what happened in South Africa. The Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early decades of the 20^th century eventually overwhelmed the white population of Detroit. Black people had nothing to do with building Detroit; but they have had everything to do with destroying it.

Same goes with South Africa.

Since 1973, when the city was roughly 50 percent white and 50 percent Black (and boasting a population almost double– of which 89 percent are Black today – the 770,000 it is today), the various – all have been Black – mayors of Detroit have had to rely on grants, borrowing funds, and federal aid to keep the city going.

Fitting that the white residents of Detroit in 1973 – before packing their bags and heading to the suburbs to thrive – tried to save the city via the ballot box. Charles M. Carey’s African-America Political Leaders tells us this about the year Young was first elected:

In 1973 Young declared his candidacy for mayor of Detroit. His opponent was John F. Nichols, the white commissioner of the police who was running on a “law and order” platform. Young stole his thunder by promising to get rid of all kinds of crime, including police brutality. The polls indicated that more than 90 percent of whites favored Nichols, while more than 90 percent of the blacks favored Young. Since African Americans barely outnumbered white in Detroit, Young won by a few thousand votes.

Young didn’t get rid of crime, with Detroit instantly becoming one of the most dangerous cities in the world, known as the “Murder Capital” of America in the 1970s. Today, the police don’t even report – nor respond to 911 calls – the crime rate.

The floodgates for hiring Black people to get back at whitey began, with Young hiring more Black officers, firefighters, and municipal clerks. No longer could city employees live in the suburbs, they were forced to live in the city.

According to The Quotations of Coleman A. Young, this employment of affirmative action hiring policies had a purpose, with the newly elected Young saying:

 “Some people say affirmative action is discrimination in reverse. You’re damned right. The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it.”

The past is never past. The lesson of Detroit is the lesson for America; once in power, the presumed inequities of the past will be rectified. In the case of The Motor City, the lingering – dwindling – white population was severely discriminated against, and yet they were asked to pay the bill for their own dispossession.

They deserve no pity. The citizens of Detroit deserve no mercy.

The state of Michigan has created 16 “Michigan Renaissance Zones” in Detroit, which are virtually free of any taxation. The whole concept of “enterprise zones” is that instantly – without government intrusion through taxes – capitalism should flourish.

But capitalism hasn’t flourished. It would not be far fetched to state that trillions of taxpayer money (via federal loans, grants, and stimulus aid) over a span of fifty-sixty years has poured into Detroit. Whether it was to fight poverty, improve the test scores and graduation of primarily Black students, fight crime, maintain infrastructure, stimulate economic growth, or just pay city bills, the aid has been a waste.

Elliot Washington in 2008 wrote these words about Detroit, with have no basis in reality:

Since the early 1930s and FDR, Detroit has had a tragic love affair with liberalism, the consequences of which have to a degree been comparable to the sieges by the cruel superpowers of antiquity – Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Huns, the Mongols. True, in Detroit there are no siege works here, no boiling oil, flaming arrows, catapults or battering rams, yet the barbarian hoards are not only at the gates, but are within the city gates, and these people, infected by a stubborn liberal mindset, are surely killing this town.

The white citizens of Detroit left, after being electorally defeated in a true racial election in 1973. This was after most had left because of the Black riot in 1967 and the high rates of Black crime that white citizens encountered in Detroit.

They built flourishing suburbs wherever they went, leaving behind a city they built to be ruled by Coleman Young and his Black friends.

Liberalism didn’t destroy Detroit anymore than capitalism did. It has been the ingenuity of others and the wealth they have created, which has been taxed by a government dedicated to the advancement of Black-Run America (BRA), and sent as federal aid and federal grants that have kept the city of Detroit going to this day.

In the Batman story No Man’s Land, Gotham City is hit with a massive earthquake that destroys the city. The cost of rebuilding is so great, the United States government decides to blow up every bridge out of Gotham and build a wall around the city, with 24/7 armed guards keeping everyone in the city (via huge walls) and preventing anyone from entering.  Even members of the clergy and philanthropic organizations are barred from entering.

This could be one of the solutions to the Detroit problem.

Or, like the plan in Robocop, a private company could bailout the city, privatizing all of the agencies (police, fire department, waste, public transit, etc.) there in the process.

Knowing that neither of these two options would ever be implemented, it must be stated that Detroit must never be bailed out again.

Taxpayer money shouldn’t continue to support a city built on reversing the perceived racism of the past, blaming whitey for every problem that Black people encounter along the way.

It’s time Black people take responsibility for their actions. In this case, we are talking about the demise of one of the great American cities. Scratch that, one of the great cities of the world.

Black people forced white people out of Detroit, who in turn rebuilt the city in their image in the surrounding lily-white suburbs.

Commerce, innovation, and economic activity flourish there.

Detroit? Regression to the mean.

The Visible Black Hand of Economics on display for the world to see. Pumped with a continuous infusion of federal grants and federal aid (your taxpayer money that could have gone to space exploration or cancer research), Detroit has continued to deteriorate under Black rule.

Mayor Bing must be told “no” when he formally requests the $150 million in aid. For the sake of all Americans – Black and white, Hispanic and Asian – the citizens of Detroit must be told why the answer is “no” as well.