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Anatomy of the Collapse of a Failed City

For the third year in a row, Detroit schools posted DFL numbers against their peers in a voluntary study of performance in reading and math at the 4th and 8th grade levels. The rare DFL-threepeat.

So if the theory is that the exodus of students drains resources, why did Detroit Public Schools have the highest per-pupil expenditures in the State in 2010 with $15,570.00? Read more, here:

It’s not hard to understand why. Besides the lack of quality in the classroom, fraud and mismanagement have also plagued the DPS for over a decade. As far back as 1999, a seven-month investigation by the Detroit News concluded that a $1.5 billion bond issue for school improvements was a disaster. ”Incompetence, mismanagement, and cronyism by Detroit school officials, employees, and contractors, and a system with inadequate safeguards, have devastated a $1.5 billion school construction project,” the paper stated. In June 2009, Robert Bobb brought in a team of forensic accounting analysts, who discovered that 257 “ghost” employees were receiving paychecks. Two months later, seven more public officials were charged with multiple felonies for operating an embezzlement scheme. It was also discovered that approximately 500 illegal healthcare dependents were costing the district millions. In 2012, a DPS contract accountant and her daughter, a teacher, were indicted by the FBI for fraud, conspiracy and tax charges.

Thus, it is unsurprising that a district boasting a $103.6 million budget surplus as recently as 2002 found itself on the brink of bankruptcy by 2009. Yet such corruption was not limited to people involved with the DPS. It is part of a larger pattern of citywide corruption perpetrated by people such as former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his aide, the wife of House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI), several city council members and a police chief who, along with countless others, were indicted, arrested and/or imprisoned for criminal charges involving bribes, embezzlement and kickbacks. As result, the threat of bankruptcy looms not just over the school system, but the entire city of Detroit as well.

If racism is driving force behind these problems (and not the greed and plunder that comes with a half-century of political hegemony), did we not have racism in Detroit in the 1950's and 1960's when Detroit lead the world in auto manufacturing? Everything was going along swimmingly until we invented racism in the late 1960's? Our country didn't stop building cars, they stopped building them in Detroit. They left, and moved South. Why is that? Is the theory that they moved to the American South to escape racism? Please let that be the theory.
 
RChildress107 said:
yeah cause there's never been any racism or white flight in Chicago.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about what cities should do to fix the effects of institutionalized racism. Detroit is a great example of what not to do. If you actually want to reverse those effects its helpful to know where they came from. I suspect JMHD and others don't actually have any desire to reverse those effects, they are just looking for talking points about Democrats failed policies and then using those talking points to absolve themselves from doing anything about the situation.

I am not a Democrat because I don't buy the logic behind many of their policies, but at least they are trying to help the less fortunate in this country instead of sitting on their hands and yelling about how the other side is failing (or actively encouraging that failure).
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Taking Detroit as our case study, please prove this theory. I'd like you to begin by defending the walk-out of the public schools engineered by the Michigan Education Association, where teachers were encouraged by their union bosses to call in sick and instead protest a contemplated action by the legislature. The result? Classes were cancelled across the school system leaving 26,000 students without teachers. That's okay, I'm sure the Nation's three-time defending unchampion schoolchildren needed a breather.

But I know what you're going to say: omelets take broken eggs. Surely the teachers were encouraged to walk out in protest of the highest per-pupil spending in the State, or a cut to funding to their education, or maybe to lobby the passage of a replacement bond package for the earlier catastrophically implemented $1.5B dollar package from the last decade that was squandered. Surely the legislature's contemplated action was such a clear and present danger to the welfare of schoolchildren in Detroit that it was worth walking out on classrooms in the school system that President Obama's Secretary of Education described as a "national disgrace", right? So what was the legislation that cost these kids a much-needed day in the classroom?

Oops.

It's hard to "try to help the less fortunate" when you continually tolerate gross (and often criminal) mismanagement of public resources in a way that is so terribly bad that people flee. Dems have had the complete run of the place for over fifty years; if Pubs were any obstruction to Detroit, they have been a toothless tiger for half of a century. Dems have had carte blanche over every significant public office since the invention of racism in 1962.

How is that going?

But at least the Dem's are "trying", you say? Watch noted right-wing homer Dan Rather's profile on the management of the DPS (if you can):

Executive summary:

Full failure edition:

Can we finally put the "but at least they're trying" myth to bed, when they resist at every turn any reforms that aren't blessed by their orthodoxy (charters, vouchers, or anything else they didn't think of that might undercut their power/money)? If you really were trying, wouldn't you see what isn't working and try new management or new ideas? The truth is the school system is circling the drain and they are holding on to the last vestiges of power for dear life. "Trying" isn't the first word that comes to mind.

P.S. I'm no stranger to what comes next. The message gets a little murky, so out come the arrows at the messenger. "jhmd2000 hates the poor". Take a look at the Dan Rather video. Look at the people who plundered DPS resources, look at what it's done, and then look at how hard you feel compelled to go after people who want to change this utterly failed system. Arguing against any reforms (real reforms, not throwing good money after the existing billion dollar annual budget; I'm referring to actual changes in policies) is a de facto argument for the status quo. An argument in favor of the status quo and against reform is borderline predation of the futures of the children of the failed city of Detroit. Anyone who truly hated the poor would cling to the status quo and oppose any real reforms, and would focus their efforts of smearing the messenger and shifting blame. If you hate the poor, you'd oppose reform, shout down dissent and let the status quo play itself out, since it seems to me that it isn't serving the poor particularly well. Sleep tight.
 
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Wrangor said:
Straw man alert. No one argued that housing policy didn't in some way CONTRIBUTE. The statement was made that racism was the cause of the fall of Detroit. That is a painfully ignorant statement.

Path dependency is a real phenomenon that was encouraged by the failed policies of Detroit. When you make it easier and easier to stay in a rut by continually subsidizing inactivity then the cost barrier to get out of that rut because more and more of an obstacle. This is true in both business and personal finances.

You unknowingly made a great point against yourself. Path dependency is a huge part of the failure of Detroit. The government and union policies encouraged status quo and whenever status quo began to change they fought it back (government and unions). Instead of allowing Detroit to evolve with the times (and allowing people to change and adapt) the city government and unions put a hedge around the businesses and people of Detroit.


While the rest of the world fought through tough changes, Detroit stayed behind the hedge. When the local government ran out of money and when the businesses could not longer afford the unions demands/pensions, the hedge died and the reality of a changed economy and world came busting through the gates. The city crumbled because the cost to change at that point in time was completely unmanageable. If the city had been allowed to change naturally it could have absorbed the hits and improved gradually over time.
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can someone explain this to the App State guy. I have no idea what this means
 
tjcmd said:
And don't forget the huge role the airlines have played in white flight.
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The irony is that many suburban whites always want to fly to countries populated by dark-skinned peoples.
 
94Deac said:
The irony is that many suburban whites always want to fly to countries populated by dark-skinned peoples.
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I do! Give me Costa Rica 7 days a week. Are they dark enough?
 
So we've learned from jhmd and his trusty sidekick that the working class up north shoulda been happy with Alabama or SC wages and bennies all along and they'd be fine now. Negotiating with management for more salary and bennies is just wrong and lookie there what it did to Detroit and Chicago. Be thankful you have a job by the grace of the job creators
 
WakeandBake said:
So we've learned from jhmd and his trusty sidekick that the working class up north shoulda been happy with Alabama or SC wages and bennies all along and they'd be fine now. Negotiating with management for more salary and bennies is just wrong and lookie there what it did to Detroit and Chicago. Be thankful you have a job by the grace of the job creators
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To be fair to jhmd, I'm not sure that's what he's saying. It takes two sides to make a stupid deal with a union - the union, and the management/politicians that sign off on the contract. I'm not speaking for jhmd, but personally I don't blame the union for trying to get the best deal it can for its members, I blame the Detroit politicians who signed these stupid contracts in exchange for union votes. There's a damn good reason public employee unions can't collectively bargain with politicians in a lot of states. It is also fair to point out that the Detroit government over the years has been not only incompetent but seriously, fundamentally corrupt.

All that can be true while also recognizing the role that redlining and racist housing and development policies played in Detroit.
 
I understood jhmd to be blaming the unionized workers, and the unions themselves, not necessarily the politicians.
 
WakeandBake said:
I understood jhmd to be blaming the unionized workers, and the unions themselves, not necessarily the politicians.
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Most deals are two way streets. This one was a case of dumb and dumber.
 
OK. I'm no union expert and don't pretend to be.

So the unionized workers were dumb to want more money for their work. They shot themselves in the foot over greed. They sank a whole city, right?


Would that same logic apply to supply-siders on a national scale? Would it apply to the 1% who are content - check that, making money hand over fist - letting the government subsidize their cheap labor and low taxes with debt?

I went to App so, you know, but explain to me how you justify one and condemn the other. Isn't it basically the same scam?
 
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WakeandBake said:
OK. I'm no union expert and don't pretend to be.

So the unionized workers were dumb to want more money for their work. They shot themselves in the foot over greed. They sank a whole city, right?


Would that same logic apply to supply-siders on a national scale? Would it apply to the 1% who are content - check that, making money hand over fist - letting the government subsidize their cheap labor and low taxes with debt?

I went to App so, you know, but explain to me how you justify one and condemn the other. Isn't it basically the same scam?
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It's a broken system creating its most aggravated harm. Public sector unions lobbying politicians to vote them their grandchildren's money. The only people who have no say in the matter are the people who a) get none of the benefit, and b) all of the bill. It's not hard to see where it goes wrong.
 
jhmd2000 said:
It's a broken system creating its most aggravated harm. Public sector unions lobbying politicians to vote them their grandchildren's money. The only people who have no say in the matter are the people who a) get none of the benefit, and b) all of the bill. It's not hard to see where it goes wrong.
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Right but isn't it happening from the top down also?

How is it different from paying workers low wages and letting the government subsidize them with food stamps and medicaid paid for with their grandchildren's debt service, while demanding tax cuts themselves and lower regs?
 
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WakeandBake said:
Right but isn't it happening from the top down also?

How is it different from paying workers low wages and letting the government subsidize them with food stamps and medicaid paid for with their grandchildren's debt service, while demanding tax cuts themselves and lower regs?
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I'm pretty sure that my record against deficit spending is solid. I think we should have a federal balanced budget Amendment, which can be suspended only under a Congressional declaration of War. There is no excuse for going $16T in the hole during a time when 99% of the country is at peace.

I'm an across the board tax increases, across the board spending cuts guy. Our infantile persistence that others (read the unborn) should pay our bills is unsustainable and un-American in the most original sense.
 
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