Overworked fire department, failing hydrants, bad roads, Detroit burns.
As you may or may not know, Detroit is about to be forced into receivership, which is the fate of towns and cities that go bankrupt.
I have observed this process firsthand, from the inside and the outside, having lived in Highland Park during its receivership. Highland Park is a city of 15,000 inhabitants, surrounded by Detroit on three sides and is poorer than Detroit, with an even larger disproportionate demographic minority.
I was invited by former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, onto a committee that was supposed to help Highland Park. After months of sympathy but no actual financial help from the State, it all came to a head when an uneducated, but bright and astute elderly Highland Park matriarch stood up at one of these endless meetings and said, "Enough of this bull. Show me the money!"
You could have heard a pin drop. After that, the Governor ended the charade and the State got down to what it was all really about, namely selling off all of Highland Park's assets. They actually attempted to sell off HP's water department to a group of less than savory investors which by good luck and chance was headed off before coming to fruition.
How is it going? The authorities are busy removing street lights in HP. Did this little piece of social engineering work? You be the judge.
Now it is Detroit's turn, and this time it will have a much greater impact. Consider Highland Park has only 15,000 people; even with decades of flight, Detroit has a population a three quarters of a million inhabitants, fifty times larger.
Make no mistake, however well intentioned Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder may be, what is about to happen is nothing less than a colonial-style rape on a magnitude never seen before in Michigan's history. Since the introduction of the controversial Public Act 4, which allows the Governor to remove elected city officials without due process, it essentially disenfranchises a huge demographic minority that knows all to well what it means to be deprived of civil rights. Furthermore, the free-for-all sell-off of city assets will throw open the doors to the awaiting carpetbaggers who are well versed in the racist new-speak of our day. These will proceed to strip Detroit of every asset they can possibly get their hands on.
The apologists will say it has nothing to do with race, which is absurd; one only has to observe what cities have been targeted for receivership: Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Flint, Detroit - all of them with disproportional demographic minorities.
This has to be stopped. It is unconstitutional, destructive, racist, and just plain downright wrong.
It would appear that the only civil tools the citizens have left to fight this looming 'Detroit Hunger Games' is non-compliance and civil disobedience.
Many US cities that have been hit by financial difficulties do indeed manage to retrench and thrive again when they emerge from bankruptcy; this will not be true of Detroit, it is a special case.
The antiquated tools of law available for socially engineering demographic minority cities are grossly insufficient and merit serious Federal oversight. Michigan's largest city can be likened to a submarine that has blown its last ballast and is now rapidly sinking into the abyss. This is not a local problem; it has the proportions of a national disaster that has been decades in the making and will not be easy to solve.
Michigan's long history of subterranean racial divisiveness has brought Detroit to this, and the tools at hand are simply insufficient for righting the wrongs it has wrought. Nothing less than major US Federal intervention can have any significant impact at this point, and delay will only serve to worsen the problem.
