printIf these minority penalizing budgetary cuts were inflicted in New Hampshire, Desiree Cooper of Detroit Public TV would have probably cried foul. But they aren’t, so Cooper keeps her cool in an excellent factual account about Detroit’s black-dominated city council, and its efforts to save the city’s finances by consolidating services. (Read: directing these to those who PAY.)
This invariably means directing services to the dwindling tax base (You Know Who), so that this productive, paying minority gets the best bang for its huge outlays and goodwill and… STAYS IN TOWN. These good people want to remain in the city they helped build.
Have their overlords realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that keeping the taxpayers who pay their salaries happy might just be the key to their own statist status? As Cooper puts it in this remarkably impartial report: It is these “dedicated Detroiters, the more affluent Detroiters who are part of the tax base [that] the city desperately wants to hold on to.”
Barbara and Spencer Barefield are an example. The couple has “what they consider a small house amongst Palmer Woods’ mansions.” They (and their ilk; nudge-nudge) will be accorded “preferential treatment in this community’s upkeep, maintaining roads, sidewalks and streetlights. That could mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.”
Of course, it is a travesty to frame as “preferential” the provision of basic services in return for enormous outlays. It shows you how far we have gone in assimilating Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The Barefield are Detroiters of quite a deep dye, as they are prepared to put up with a $900-a-month utility bill!
READ MORE about the “Detroit Works” project, undertaken by Mayor Dave Bing and his crew—architect Rainy Hamilton, Karla Henderson who heads Detroit Works, City Council President Charles Pugh, and others—in an attempt to save the city (and their sinecures?):
With a sprawling city, 139 square miles, and few resources for city services, Mayor Bing took the Detroit Works project as an opportunity to redefine the city’s physical, economic and social landscape. He began by taking inventory, taking a close look at what Detroit really has.
Demographers have identified at least 100 distinct neighborhoods within the city limits. With that in mind, Detroit Works unveiled its short-term plan, classifying the city’s neighborhoods by their quality of housing and stability of population.
The degree of city services and investment would depend on whether the neighborhood is deemed steady, transitional, or distressed.
UPDATE (Dec. 13): Erik in the comment below blames honky in what sounds like vintage Yankee propaganda. You’ll get better historical facts about the South from reading or watching the brilliant timeless “Gone with the Wind.” So too did Mencken write about the civilization destroyed by the “dirty Yankees.” The South was the seat of the country’s aristocracy—and some of the finest families in America.
Although my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, advances the cultural argument in explaining underdevelopment, it is also highly critical of it. As follows:
In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”
But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.
In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.
Read it, Erik. Mimicking whitey, if that is indeed your and Sowell’s explanation for black dysfunction, falls flat when it comes to Africa.
The left/liberal, Democrat establishment can cling to predominantly black communities, which guarantee a destroyed cities. Taxes sky high, union dominated schools and services, white flight, crime and corruption: all go hand in hand. Detroit is just a sample of the worst. I don’t see any improvement in sight no matter what they try. These communities are incapable of changing because they are incapable of recognizing the root problem, which is the problem of pretending the population is actually able to operate on a 21st century level. Detroit, Chicago, New York, California, Somalia, South Africa, Haiti and all the rest have the same situation and face the same barbarous fate. I wonder why this is so difficult for people to recognize.
Because such “recognition” involves admitting the reality of hard-core racial differences in mental and moral capacities. From South Africa to Haiti to Detroit, the effects of the Black Undertow are obvious. Whites will either flee, form their own militant communities, or be swept away by it.
To Trilby:Well said. However in today’s world of government control I don’t think the Whites would be able to set up any kind of militant community without being squashed. Remember the lenient, kid gloves coddling shown to black rioters will not be extended to Whites who buck the system. A pliable, obedient black population is necessary for the left, read Democrats, to gain complete control of the country. They’ve got to keep the Whites down and silent and paying the taxes. Their black minions are costly indeed for their masters to support.
The problem isn’t “hard-core racial differences”. The problem is hardcore cultural differences. Too many blacks, though not all, in this country embrace the culture of the white “rednecks” and “crackers” from England who settled in the antebellum south. This culture from England included such negative behavior as sexual promiscuity, laziness, belligerence, propensity for violence, crude manner and language, disrespect for education, etc.
Black slaves copied this culture. They passed it onto their progeny. It remains to this day to a substantial degree among blacks though it has withered away considerably among whites.
Thomas Sowell documents this history in his book, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”. Blacks from other parts of the world don’t exhibit so called “authentic” black culture.
Government welfare programs encouraged this behavior by rewarding its product, unwed mothers, through subsidies–thus helping to keep it alive.
People who embrace this culture tend to fail not because of their race but because these behaviors aren’t productive.
I am not a racist though I am a culturalist. By that I mean I believe some cultures are superior to others.
Eric, you win the prize for the most far-fetched piece of illogical reasoning of the month. Black culture is what it is because the slaves copied English “rednecks” and the way they acted and lived? What about Haiti? What about Africa? What about looking at things realistically instead of through some set of rose colored glasses in an attempt to deny the obvious. You sound like a university sociology professor or someone else equally deluded.
Clearly a subject to go from more than one angle to. In my community, its understood that the wealthier sections get better treatment and we have a quarter cent “extra” tax to pay for the “improvements” on the lower side. I think that’s normal in one form or another for most communities. Some large “democratic” cities are just figuring it out that there is no free lunch. Eric and Thomas Sowell have a point but, I don’t think it is completely accurate. The South did get a lot of immigration from the Cumberland Gap of Northern England which was mixed Irish, Scots and English with unsettled cultural values. Poor Blacks would naturally be included in that hodge podge; however, there are a great many good stable Black people and Black communities dispersed all over this country. The problem Blacks are all from large cities where production is limited and social services prevail. I don’t think that there are easy answers to the poor of any race, white, black, red or yellow.
Wow! I guess I did a poor job of expressing my point of view. I certainly didn’t mean to blame honky. Thinking about it, I should have been more specific when writing, “blacks from other parts of the world don’t exhibit so called ‘authentic’ black culture.” I was thinking Colin Powell and the high percentage of successful Haitian immigrants though I agree that principle doesn’t apply to black South Africans and others.
Jews, Chinese and Poles succeeded here though they experienced much prejudice because their cultures supported positive behavior. Black culture fails when it supports negative behavior. While prejudice may be a factor it is inadequate as an explanation.
I agree that the slave’s African Black culture was inferior to a lot of southern Anglo-Saxon culture even before the influence of English redneck culture. I also believe that before leftist honky’s good intentions were backed up by legislation, black culture was beginning to self correct.
There are much evidence. Black unemployment and illegitimacy rates were lower than white’s both among adults and teenagers in the 40’s and 50’s according to Sowell and others. One of the best if not the best academic high schools in Washington D.C. in the 40’s was the black segregated high school according to my mother who lived there.
My intended larger point was that culture–not race–is the problem. There is certainly room for discussion about how culture develops.
In any case, man possessing free will, bad behavior is logically the responsibility of the one displaying it regardless of his culture.