Starnesville!!! I mean, er, Detroit
Posted on 07/27/2013 7:02:47 PM PDT by MuttTheHoople
Alas, they must be read! but just taking them would be construed as theft, and the bureaucracy would stonewall permission.
They taxed the rich till there are no rich any more.
I've read here several times that the last Republican mayor of Detroit left office in 1962. That's still over half a century of Democrat mis-management.
I’m sure I’ll catch grief for saying this, but what the heck, truth is truth! The Detroit Black communities are leaving Detroit and migrating north/northwest to the Metro-Detroit area suburbs; places like Macomb and Oakland counties. They are slowly turning these suburbs into the same sh*t-hole as Detroit. Wherever Blacks gather in mass, they turn their neighborhoods into sh*t holes. This is what happens when an entire group of people have been co-opted by white liberals, and have been brainwashed into believing they are forever victims. Since most Blacks in Detroit rely on a large amounts, if not total State and Federal aid, they have no incentive to take care of what they have. This is why they are satisfied with living in hell holes. When a person is given everything, and don’t earn it, they have no incentive to take care of it. When Blacks in Detroit get pi$$ed, they burn their neighborhoods down.
Revolt is coming.
I want the piano. I notice the top against the wall in the background looks to be in pretty good shape.
I will offer the city of Detroit $100 cash for that piano to go towards satisfying its debt, but expect free shipping for that price.
I am currently an Amazon “prime” member!
WAKE UP AMERICA! TAKE THOSE LEFTIST ROSE COLORED GLASSES OFF! STATISM IS TURNING AMERICA INTO DETROIT - AYN RAND’S STARNESVILLE COME TO LIFE
By Daniel Hannan
You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction?
Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:
What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.
Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.
Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.
They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.
“Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.
The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.
Rearden pointed. “That one.”
“It’s closed.”
Now here’s the really extraordinary thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest per capita GDP in the United States.
The real-life Starnesville, like the fictional one, decayed slowly, then collapsed quickly. I spent a couple of weeks in Detroit in 1991. The city was still functioning more or less normally, but the early signs of decomposition were visible. The man I was staying withn, a cousin of my British travelling companion, ran a bar and restaurant. He seemed to my teenage eyes to be the embodiment of the American dream: he had never been to college, but got on briskly and uncomplainingly with building a successful enterprise. Still, he was worried. He was, he told me, one of a shrinking number of taxpayers sustaining more and more dependents. Maybe now, he felt, was the time to sell up, while business was still good.
He wasn’t alone. The population of Motown has fallen from two million to 700,000, and once prosperous neighbourhoods have become derelict. Seventy six thousand homes have been abandoned; estate agents are unable to shift three-bedroom houses for a dollar.
The Observer, naturally, quotes a native complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions.
Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions. Under the mountain of accumulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public employees’.
Which brings us to the scariest thing of all. Detroit could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United States. As Mark Steyn puts it in the National Review:
Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.
Oh dear. No wonder the president would rather talk about Trayvon Martin. If you want to see Obamanomics taken to its conclusion, look at Starnesville. And tremble.
And if any of you have Netfix it is streaming on their instant video site right now.
I watched it and was stunned at the stupidity.
Speaking of the Irish, how did they ever get over it?
I don't blame you for believing whatever you want, I'd just ask you to consider the standard refrain you're singing. Who wrote it? Who benefits? What is it designed to do?
You have a standing invitation to come visit my business and observe reality at ground zero. After you leave, you can sing any song you want.
Idiots did. People that would trade their children's future for a little free stuff today. Socialists, communists, union members - people that weren't smart enough to see the destruction of their actions.
Basically, the same people that put the likes of Hitler and Stalin in power in the last century. Detroit is a rare view of our country's future if we don't change paths.
bump
Oh please...you're going to base this level of self-destruction on some kind of cultural ideology? No, this destruction was man-made...nothing more, nothing less - it's called abandonment.Yes. One day, the people got up and abandoned the city. Happens all the time.
You can't fix liberals.
exactly
My response:
If the issue is “abandonment” then all those $500 and $1000 houses should have just filled right up and that would be that. Those houses did not sell, they cannot give them away. Even the dumbest leftists (I repeat myself) know better than to take a free house in Detroit. The reason people and jobs moved out is the same reason that the commies built the Berlin Wall. Socialism is a PRISON. Socialism is a boot stomping you in the face, forever. Socialism requires sniper towers and barbed-wire. Socialism requires victims to blame for the rot that socialism cases. Detroit was abandoned because it did not build a wall and sniper towers, it is that simple.
yet the city fathers think spending....400 million on a sports arena...aka stadium will somehow make the city magically spring back to life...
amazing
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