'Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit'

So, it's a no-go on the proposed 'drive-by blight' the hilariously incompetent Emergency Manager of Detroit, Kevyn Orr, dared to suggest would convince creditors to have sympathy on the state of a 90 percent black city and its $17 billion deficit. [Orr cancels creditors' bus tour of Detroit, Detroit News, July 10, 2013]:

The canceled tour of the ruins of Detroit, proposed by Kevyn Orr, for the creditors to see the blight in the 90 percent black city would have required the signing of a waiver freeing the city from any deaths that happened on said tour...

Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr on Tuesday scrapped a scheduled bus tour for Wall Street creditors of the city’s worst areas. 

Several creditors decided against taking the tour Wednesday and said they would rather spend time researching the city’s financial condition, the emergency manager’s spokesman Bill Nowling said. 

Initially, 25 people — mostly bondholders, insurers and other unsecured creditors from New York City and New Jersey — signed up but several have canceled in the wake of media attention and interest in covering the tour. The tour required creditors to sign a waiver indemnifying the city if anyone was injured or killed during the roughly three-hour trip. 

“The creditors are pulling out — they don’t want their pictures taken,” Nowling said. 

Nowling said a tour could be rescheduled with creditors, who are in town this week meeting with members of Orr’s restructuring team. 

“Mr. Orr still encourages the city’s creditors to visit and tour the city on their own to see first-hand the issues ordinary Detroiters must deal with each day,” Nowling said in a prepared statement. “If creditors do take the time to see all of Detroit they will better understand why the Emergency Manager proposed a restructuring plan that focuses on creating a strong, viable and solvent Detroit that is able to provide the most basic of services. Restructuring is not just about balance sheets, it’s also about the 700,000 Detroiters who need the city to thrive again.” 

The tour was conceived after some financial creditors balked at agreeing to concessions that would keep the city from filing the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Some creditors also questioned whether Orr’s restructuring plan cuts deep enough and pushed the emergency manager to sell city assets, such as the Detroit Institute of Arts’ world-renowned collection. 

The plan was to have bondholders ride a Detroit Department of Transportation bus — not a chartered coach — and likely be shadowed by armed security as the bus traveled through some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. 

Bankruptcy experts said the tour was a novel approach, but unlikely to sway creditors who are focused on numbers, not emotion.

We at SBPDL live by the rule, "focus on numbers, not emotion."

Not even the prospect of armed-guards (XE, we hope) would keep the creditors safe, knowing they'd have to sign a waiver freeing the 90 percent black city of Detroit of any liability in the event they were killed on such a tour.

A three-hour tour of Detroit required the signing away of your life, like you were about to take a voyage on the S.S. Minnow, where instead of the Skipper and Gilligan as your guide, you had armed guards at your side to protect against the real threat of black violence?

What is this, Jurassic Park?

Then again, in late 2012, the Detroit Police Officers Association warned citizens and out-of-towners that they entered the 90 percent black city at their own risk, so it shouldn't be surprising the collapsing black metropolis is more violent than an island filled with genetically-engineered dinosaurs [Visit Detroit at your own risk, police union warns, U.S. News and World Report, October 8, 2012]. 

And, no, liberal policies didn't turn Detroit into a post-apocalyptic state. No one is warning tourists about visiting such liberal cities as Portland, Austin, Denver, Boulder, or San Francisco. 

Sorry Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation: the reason there are 400 liquor stores in Detroit and no national grocery chains is because the citizens of that city have created economic/moral conditions where the free market has responded to the demand. 

It's called the Visible Black Hand of Economics. 

And not once in a New York Times article bemoaning the economic state of the 90 percent black city does Monica Davey mention the city's demographic situation. 

The reason?

 Such an admission represents the public execution of the system we have dubbed Black-Run America (BRA). [Financial Crisis Just a Symptom of Detroit’s Woes, New York Times, July 9, 2013]:

A question unimaginable in most major American cities is utterly commonplace in this one: If you suddenly found yourself gravely ill, injured or even shot, would you call 911? 

Many people here say the answer is no. Some laugh at the odds of an ambulance appearing promptly, if ever. In Detroit, people map out alternative plans instead, enlisting a relative or a friend. 

As officials negotiate urgently with creditors and unions in a last-ditch effort to spare Detroit from plunging into the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, residents say the city has worse problems than its estimated $18 billion debt. 

“The city is past being a city now; it’s gone,” said Kendrick Benguche, whose family lives on a block with a single streetlight, just down from a vacant firehouse that sits beside a burned-out home. The Detroit police’s average response time to calls for the highest-priority crimes this year was 58 minutes, officials now overseeing the city say.  

The department’s recent rate of solving cases was 8.7 percent, far lower, the officials acknowledge, than clearance rates in cities like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and St. Louis.“I guess I’ll be glad if someone else takes over and other people run this thing,” Mr. Benguche said. “The way I look at it, the city is already bankrupt.”

Since 1974, the city of Detroit has been 365Black (a fact black publications like Ebony and Jet once celebrated, but now run from acknowledging).

Black, black, black.

And more black.

Yet you aren't supposed to notice this, for the bedrock of our society shifts and an earthquake of unimaginable power supplants the notion of equality once and for all.

This is going to end.

The earthquake is coming.

Don't weep for what is lost, don't cry for yesterday.

Just be prepared to roll the dice one more time.