I am not happy today. Not happy at all. I was not expecting actual bankruptcy. I kinda thought the entire point of the Emergency Manager was to avoid bankruptcy, but whatever. Apparently the unions weren't willing to screw their members enough for Kevyn Orr to balance the books. On any other day I'd sympathize with them, but today. Fuck 'em.
I did a little series on the City's problems back when Orr got appointed. I made a point of not blaming the suburbs. But today fuck em.
I had a new series planned after reading Orr's massive 134-page powerpoint to creditors. I never got around to finishing it, tho, so fuck me too.
Below the fold some of the ideas I had for that series, plus probably some more unwarranted, unfair, and just plain mean insults. Also confusing grammar. If you don't like it fuck you. It's been that kind of day.
One of the main points in my series was gonna be that anybody who blames this mess on "leadership" is an idiot who knows nothing. Yeah Kwame sucked, but Kwame was mayor for less then seven years. Ken Cockrel Jr. and Dave Bing had five years to fix it. They couldn't.
The reason is simple: Detroit is set-up to fail. To an extent all the rust belt cities are. they're old, their regional economies aren't growing, therefore their populations're stagnant. Since the '50s people want bigger houses (ie: more square feet), rust belt suburbs have incorporated, therefore rust belt cities can't annex (ie: gain square feet), therefore rust belt cities can't add square feet. This is why the only rust belt cities that don;t suck are Indy (owns it's whole damn county), Columbus (owns half the County, and has unincorporated suburbs it annexes without mercy), and Chicago (dominates it's county).
But that's not Detroit's only problem. Another problem is something I glossed over in my original series on the basis that calling people racist makes them a lot less likely to agree with you. But that wasn't today. Today fuck 'em.
Have you ever heard of John F. Nichols? In Michigan he's kinda legendary as the worst police chief ever. When he ran the Detroit Police he personally created a squad that included a gentlemen by the name of Raymond Peterson. Peterson turned out to be a Psycho racist serial killer, who pled guilty by reason of insanity to nine murders. A half-dozen more homicides by that squad have never been satisfactorily resolved, and probably never will be, because cops are good at covering their tracks. And right after all this came out the local suburban county made Nichols Sheriff. He won re-election every four years until he died in 1999.
In other words the Detroit region took a divisive racial fight from an era of divisive racial fights (the early 70s) and institutionalized it. Jesus Christ himself couldn't fix a region where the major suburbs a) had their own government, and b) designed it to institutionalize the most divisive fight of the region's history.
Goddamnit I meant to get to some of the reasons it's hard for me to even consider moving back, the stuff from Orr's report, etc. but this post is already too fucking long, and I'm up too fucking late. Maybe I'll get out of my funk tomorrow and post something useful, but I wouldn't bet on it.