Michigan legislative action thread
Posted on 12/10/2013 4:57:33 AM PST by canuck_conservative
“Anytime somebody says it can’t happen, I whip those pictures out and say, ’Oh, don’t you bet against it,’” Orr said the other day, not long after a federal judge allowed Detroit to become the nation’s largest city ever to enter bankruptcy. “Let me show you what can happen.”
Orr, 55, who has never run for political office, finds himself in an extraordinary role. He holds power even more concentrated than that of the emergency control board that intervened when New York City was teetering near bankruptcy: an unelected lawyer chiefly responsible for the reinvention of a major American city in decay. And there’s a deadline – 10 months....
The job could not be more politically fraught. Orr’s harshest critics call him a “dictator” (his authority trumps that of the city’s elected leaders); an “Uncle Tom” (he is black and was sent to run this mostly-black city by a white governor); and a “pension killer” (he has said the city can no longer afford the pensions it promised retirees). But Orr, who was a partner at the law firm Jones Day until his wife and a mentor helped talk him into taking the Detroit job, seems unfazed by the storm around him – he is full of smiles and quips, coolly pressing on.....
But he has also been a target during protests. Detroiters groaned at the attitude they perceived in a comment he made to The Wall Street Journal – “For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy and rich.” Orr has said that it was in no way meant as an insult against contemporary Detroiters, but an observation about circumstances 100 years ago....
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
Had to excerpt, read the whole thing.
Kind of a stupid explanation, if true. His remark was fully applicable up to 50 years ago or so.
Its too bad voters rejected the better emergency manager law. It would have given him the power to fire city council members and replace them with hand picked ones on an interim basis.
You are correct. He means 1950 when Detroit had the highest per capita income in the world.
But by 1954 Detroit’s population started to decline because of high housing costs and manufacturing moving to nearby Suburbs.
During the 70s and early 80s I had quite a few visits in Detroit on business. Most memorable was the Republican Convention in 1980 in which Ronald Reagan was nominated. Even then the city had become unsafe, and I chose to stay in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river and a world away as far as public safety was concerned.
The city went down very quickly after that. My last memory being of a trip through Detroit on the relative safety of the Interstate Highway system until my traveling friend let the gas get too low and was forced to leave the highway and find fuel. It was broad daylight and the scariest place I have ever seen. I honestly didn’t think we would leave there alive.
Yeah, since then they have been dumb, lazy, mean, and poor. :)
I’d rather walk in a Detroit blackout than many areas of most cities during the day.
A little self awareness goes a long way plus its legal to defend yourself with lethal force in Michigan.
20 Detroit-area Residents Charged in Medicare Fraud Strike Force Takedown for Approximately $34 Million in False Billing
Twenty Detroit-area residents have been charged for their roles in physician home visit, home health care, chiropractic and psychotherapy schemes to submit more than $34 million in false billing to Medicare.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/December/13-crm-1283.html
Perhaps the greatly reduced population has made the Detroit of 2013 a much less scary place. While I wouldn’t care to board a public transit bus out of Grand Circus Park, I have driven most everywhere else and was never gripped by fear.
I find parts of Chicago and Philadelphia to much more threatening. Parts of the Bronx (NYC) can be scary as well.
Thought you might be following the saga.
5.56mm
Detroit is changing for the better whether people want to believe it or not.
The race baiters are having a harder and harder time drawing a crowd in Detroit because the people have been hearing the same crap for 50 years and its become background noise.
When Louis Farrakhan was in Detroit a few months ago the crowd in attendance was friendly toward him but the people interviewed afterward were less impressed. They see the abandoned Nation Of Islam building rotting away and haven’t forgotten that Farrakhan himself deserted Detroit in the 80s. (He announced a plan for all Detroiters to give him $1 per month and he’ll save the city)
The race baiters have become complacent and are losing the hearts and minds.
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