Conservatives and the white supremacists are working the nexus of bigotry. They've already considered Detroit, Michigan a city ruined by the Niggers and the Nigger lovers in Washington, DC.
With Detroit being majority Black, it's always figured by some radical right wing extremist, the turmoils of the once booming manufacturing city being the faults of the Democratic Party, the unions, racial integration and liberalism.
Never blaming the corporations who shut down the factories putting hundreds out of work. Never understanding that White flight that plagues urban areas because of school busing and forced integration.
Now when I decided to go up to Detroit, my family always warn me that it's not safe going through the city at dark. Although, I don't fear any man, woman or beast, I always adhere to my surroundings.
Whenever I go to Detroit, I usually head to Windsor, Ontario in Canada. I love to see the skyscrapers of the city. Whenever I go to the Caesar's Windsor casino, I always take a look at the United States from the other side. I love to see the city from the Detroit River. Sometimes I like to ride around the neighborhoods of Grand River Avenue, Gratiot Avenue, Telegraph Road, and Eight Mile Road.
I've driven on many freeways in Detroit. I've traveled on the Chrysler Freeway/Fisher Freeway (Interstate 75), the Lodge Freeway (M-10) and Jeffries Freeway (Interstate 96) and Edsel Ford Freeway (Interstate 94).
Detroit may seem like a slum to those who never been there, but in my opinion, it's a nice city and I enjoy being there.
The Detroit metropolitan region currently holds roughly one-half of the state's population. With White people leaving en masse, most of Detroit is left in ruins while the young Blacks and Hispanic suffer in a future of crime and no way out.
Detroit remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States.
Blacks moved to the city en masse to escape Jim Crow laws in the south and find jobs.
However, they soon found themselves excluded from white areas of the city—through violence, laws, and economic discrimination (e.g., redlining).
White residents attacked black homes: breaking windows, starting fires, and exploding bombs.
The pattern of segregation was later magnified by white migration to the suburbs.
A traditional boundary between black and white is Eight Mile Road, which separates the city from suburbs to the north.
Long a major population center and major engine of worldwide automobile manufacturing, Detroit has gone through a continuing economic decline.
Detroit reached its population peak in the 1950 census at over 1.8 million people, and as of the 2010 census has less than half that amount at just over 700,000 residents. The city has declined in population with each subsequent census since 1950, for a total loss exceeding 60 percent by 2010.
The New York Times reports that Republican governor Rick Synder issue a call for an emergency manager.
This person wield sweeping powers to reshape the city. This is attracting a great amount of controversy.
The hiring of an emergency manager underscored a long, troubling arc for Detroit. Once the cradle of the American auto industry and the nation’s fourth most populous city, it is now less than half the size it was decades ago and has a public sector plagued by more than $14 billion in long-term liabilities and annual worries of cash shortfalls.
The notion set off a flurry of pointed and sometimes emotional reactions here, including an unavoidable racial and political component. Detroit is a mostly black city dominated by Democrats in a mostly white state where Republicans, including Mr. Snyder, control the capital.
At a time when many municipalities are struggling financially, five cities and three school districts in Michigan alone are already under supervision from a state-appointed emergency financial manager. But municipal finance experts pointed out that Detroit is on a different scale. “Detroit is a huge and prominent American city, so anything that happens with Detroit will set a much bigger precedent,” said Matt Fabian, a managing director at Municipal Market Advisors. “There isn’t a lot of precedent with the state taking control of a city this size.”
For decades, states have used a range of methods, including oversight boards and appointed receivers, to step in and stabilize cities that appeared to be headed toward bankruptcy or default. The methods — and the powers and roles of those charged with overseeing a troubled city — vary widely from state to state, as do opinions about whether they work. A financial control board helped New York City return from the edge of crisis in the 1970s, but such intense state involvement is more often needed in smaller cities.
For more than a year, Detroit leaders had raced to ward off an emergency manager. With a similar possibility looming last spring, city officials entered into a legal deal, giving the state some oversight as Detroit tried to cut spending and staff members and collect more tax revenue. It was not enough, said state officials, who re-examined the city’s books in recent weeks and said they found a pattern of overly optimistic revenue estimates, poor and conflicting record-keeping and endless borrowing to make up for shortfalls.
“There have been many good people that have had many plans, many attempts to turn this around — they haven’t worked,” Mr. Snyder said on Friday during a town hall meeting broadcast on local television, the start of a concerted state effort to sell the notion of an outside manager to city residents. “The way I view it, today is a day to call all hands on deck.”
While some Detroit residents saw state intervention as one more very public indication of a city crumbling, others hailed it as the first promising sign of real repair. The city’s business leaders lauded the plan, noting that Detroit’s private sector had experienced tangible signs of growth and reinvestment — including newly filled downtown offices and young entrepreneurs opening dress shops — even as the public sector had lagged.
“Bring it on,” Sandy K. Baruah, the chairman of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, said of state management. “This sends a positive message to business that Detroit is fixing its problems.”
But Detroit city officials, who have 10 days to seek reconsideration from the governor before a state board formally appoints a manager as early as this month, objected strenuously. Under a much-debated state law, an appointed manager would ultimately hold powers to cut city spending, change contracts with labor unions, merge or eliminate city departments, urge the sale of city assets and even, if all else failed, recommend bankruptcy proceedings. In an election year for mayor and the City Council, many candidates, incumbents and community leaders denounced the move as an affront to democracy and a state takeover, and called for legal action.
“For one individual to be able to wipe out the duties of our duly-elected officials, that’s more or less a dictatorship, and it’s against everything that America is supposed to be about,” said the Rev. Wendell Anthony, the president of the local NAACP. “If you come into Detroit,” Mr. Anthony said, “you own Detroit. You own education. You own police and fire.”
Mayor Dave Bing, who has not said whether he would seek re-election, was more tempered than most in his critique, suggesting that while he opposed an emergency manager, there might be a way for the state and city to work together. “I will look at the impact of the governor’s decision as well as other options, to determine my next course of action,” he said.
Michigan’s emergency manager law — and the possibility that Detroit, the state’s largest city, might be affected by it — has been a matter of contention for several years. After Mr. Snyder became governor in 2010, he and the Republican-held Legislature approved changes to the state’s two-decade-old law, giving such managers more wide-reaching powers, including the ability to drop union contracts with cities. In November, voters rejected that new version of the law, but the Legislature quickly passed a third version, which also allows relatively broad powers to change the terms of labor contracts and which will take effect this month.
But many here wonder whether any emergency manager, under any version of the law, will be enough to solve Detroit’s woes, which are in some way a reflection of the city’s own story. Beyond the nagging budget questions and the mounting debt is a place that grew with the auto industry into a city of more than 1.8 million residents and 139 square miles, then shrank decade after decade even as the city’s boundaries and infrastructure did not. With a tax base of some among about 713,000 remaining residents, Detroiters complain of late buses, high crime and darkened streetlights.
