Republican Politician Suggests Detroit Become An Indian Reservation For Black People

RANDA MORRIS/Addicting Info

“I made a prediction a long time ago and it’s come to pass. I said what we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it and then throw in the blankets and the corn.” — Oakland County (MI) Executive Director L. Brooks Patterson.

This quote came from L. Brooks Patterson, a Republican official in Oakland County, MI. Patterson has been the county’s Executive Director for 21 years. He might have said these lines back in the days when he was fighting against desegration of schools. He also said them more recently, during an interview with the New Yorker. The article came out on Martin Luther King Day, 2014.

Patterson gave the statement in response to a question about what steps Detroit might take to fix its finances.

Even as Patterson struggles against throngs of criticism and negative publicity, he doesn’t deny that these were his words. He told the Detroit Free Press that his quote was taken out of context. However, Paige Williams, who interviewed Patterson for the New Yorker, says the comment came in answer to a question regarding what steps Detroit might take to fix its financial problems.

“People know me and they know I sometimes use words to make a point,” Patterson told the Detroit Free Press earlier this week.

“When I said Detroit is going to become an Indian reservation, my point was, if you don’t get black people on their feet, the successful ones will move out and the ones that remain will be dependent. We’re getting very close to that now.”

Where does the fence come in?

So in context, he was saying that the black people in Detroit are like those other minorities, the Native Americans? But then what does herding them up have to do with getting them on feet? What benign meaning is there is ‘building a fence around them?’ Not to mention throwing in ‘blankets and corn’.

When you know where Patterson’s words are coming from, you understand that the meaning was not benign. He is the lawyer who represented the anti-segregationists in Oakland County, decades ago. He fought school busing all the way to the Supreme Court, where he eventually won the case. After that he lobbied for a ‘no busing amendment’ to the United States Constitution.

Here is a photo of Irene McCabe and attorney L. Brooks Patterson meet in Washington with Rep. Thomas Downey, D-Va., in October, 1971. McCabe and Patterson were lobbying for an anti-busing amendment to the Constitution.

Photo of a 1971 meeting with anti-bussing activists Irene McCabe, young Attorney L. Brooks Patterson (now a Republican official for Oakland County, MI), and Rep. Thomas Downey (D-VA). Photo from the Detroit News Photo Gallery Archives.

 Patterson’s entire career has been focused on building fences to keep ‘those people out.’

Patterson believes in fences. He’s been working at keeping ‘those people out’ of his own community for a very long time. I think maybe he’s gotten so old and set in his ways that he just forgot he was talking to an outsider, someone who might find his views shocking and more than a little distasteful.

The legacy of L. Brooks Patterson in Oakland County is that he protected the citizens of the once affluent area of from having to mingle with ‘other races.” In a way he built a fence at the border of Oakland County and the city of Detroit. In return for the fence, Oakland County voters elected him to the office of County Prosecutor. He has held one or another political office there, ever since.

 Apologize for what?

Community activists and civil rights leaders gathered in Detroit, on January 21. The Reverend Charles E. Williams III called for a sincere apology from Patterson. Patterson told the Detroit Free Press “I’m not apologizing because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

People who live in Detroit disagree with that. Here’s a video of the news report from WXYZ Action News.

Detroit To Seek Judge’s Approval For Improved Deal With Big Banks

BY ALAN PYKE/Think Progress

Detroit’s high-priced bankruptcy lawyers think a revised deal that pays large banks almost 60 cents on the dollar will win approval from the judge who rejected a previous arrangementthat was even more generous to the banks.

The deal in question relates to $300 million in loans the city has to pay back to UBS and Bank of America. Emergency manager Kevyn Orr originally wanted to pay UBS and Bank of America roughly $230 million — between 75 and 82 cents on the dollar, according to The Bond Buyer — in a deal that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes rejected. At $165 million, the new deal is cheaper for the city, but that is no guarantee of Rhodes’ approval as the judge’s objections seemed to have more to do with the process than the price. Rhodes said the city made the deal “with a gun to its head,” and insisted that Detroit and the two banks not only renegotiate the terms of the deal but that they return to his courtroom prepared to show in detail how any deal with the banks is better for the city than its alternative, which is to sue to get the loans canceled outright.

While $300 million may seem minuscule next to a total of $18 billion in unpayable debts, this deal is central to the city’s bankruptcy plan. When Detroit made the loans in question it promised to use revenue from area casinos as a last resort repayment mechanism in the event of a default. Now bankrupt, the city needs that casino money to finance basic services and operations in the short term, making the resolution of this debt a high priority for Orr and his $28 million team of consultants and lawyers.

Because the debt is attached to that collateral, the megabanks are considered “secured creditors” and are therefore legally entitled to get a somewhat better deal than the city’s “unsecured creditors,” a category which includes more than 20,000 retirees who depend upon the modest pensions they were promised. Orr has proposed paying retirees about 16 cents on the dollar of what the city owes them, and has announced that retiree health insurance plans will be canceled in the new year.

Any improvement in the terms of Orr’s deals with secured creditors like UBS and Bank of America should in theory create space for his team to be less stingy in its eventual deal with pension funds. But Orr and other officials have been adamant that pensioners will have to accept cuts no matter what. That position isn’t merely unjust, given that retirees and pension promises did not cause the city’s financial problems despite Orr’s apparent efforts to exaggerate the pension funding gap. The cuts are also unwise for the city’s future economic prospects, which experts say depend primarily upon its ability to retain and concentrate its population.

UPDATE

A lawyer for Detroit’s pension funds said Thursday he will fight the new casino funds proposal, labeling it “far too rich” and “a huge windfall” for the banks.

Ed Schultz and Michael Eric Dyson rip Rand Paul’s idea for a Detroit ‘selfie’-bailout

By Arturo Garcia/Raw Story

MSNBC host Ed Schultz and frequent guest-host Michael Eric Dyson panned Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) recent outreach trip to Detroit, Michigan, and his pitch for a plan Paul says will help the city “bail itself out.”

“Now that’s a dandy,” Schultz told Dyson. “No one knows what the heck he’s talking about.”

“He’s doing selfies,” Dyson said of Paul. “A self-bailout picture. This is the ‘selfie’ generation, self-serve. It’s good for the gas on your automobile, but it’s nothing to do with bailing yourself out. If people could bail themselves out, they wouldn’t be in the economic condition they’re in. But they didn’t get themselves in that condition, and it’s been going on for the last 40 to 50 years.”

As the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday, Paul was the featured speaker at the opening of a new Republican outreach office in the beleaguered city, part of the GOP’s efforts to reconnect with communities of color.

Paul also proposed that the city create“economic free zones,” meaning areas with unemployment rates of 12 percent or higher would qualify for personal, corporate and payroll tax cuts he argued would save the city $1.3 billion over a 10-year period.

“His heart, I’m sure, is in the right place,” Dyson said. “But his mind and his mouth and his economics are horrible. Cutting that red tape, slashing that tape thinking that it will provide opportunity for those everyday normal people there is pretty ludicrous.”

In reality, Dyson argued, it was the disproportionate accumulation of capital at the top that led the city on the path to bankruptcy, to the point that the city’s pension funds are now at risk.

“If Rand Paul wants to be a friend to those people in Detroit, figure out a way to stimulate the economy,” he told Schultz. “Figure out a way to return democratic rule back to the people who were duly sworn in to do so and give the mayor of Detroit a powerful hand here and not make him a manager of the city.”

Watch Schultz’s interview with Dyson, aired Friday on MSNBC, below.

White House to announce $300 million in aid Friday to make Detroit safer, erase blight

By Todd Spangler/Detroit Free Press 

WASHINGTON — Nearly $300 million in aid for Detroit — from federal and state coffers, private businesses and charitable foundations — will be announced Friday as Obama administration officials visit the city to discuss what can be done to help eradicate blight, improve transportation, encourage new business and make residents safer.

The funding will include some $150 million in blight eradication and community redevelopment, including $65 million in Community Development Block Grant funding — which had already been awarded over two years but couldn’t be accessed by the city. Another $25 million could help hire as many as 150 new firefighters in the city.

Some $24 million in federal resources which had been tied up will go to repairing buses and installing security cameras, part of an overall $140 million investment in transit systems. And several charitable groups — the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation and Knight Foundation — will plow millions into spurring entrepreneurship and creating new jobs.

Gene Sperling, the head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council and an Ann Arbor native, briefed reporters on some the plans Thursday evening, saying Friday’s meeting at Wayne State is “the first of many efforts that the administration will engage in with the city of Detroit.” Many details were still to come out Friday.

“We’ve found significant resources that we believe can be unlocked and expedited and leveraged to have significant impact on the economy of Detroit,” Sperling said.

Gov. Rick Snyder, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr — who on Detroit’s behalf filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history in July — will be part of the talks with Sperling, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Representatives of local foundations and business leaders were expected to be present as well. Members of Michigan’s congressional delegation were expected to attend if they could break away from votes with a federal shutdown looming at midnight Monday without a funding resolution.

“If we’re not there we’ll teleconference,” said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. “I think what is really important is there is an ongoing commitment from the administration.”

Sperling wasn’t immediately able to break down just how much of the $300 million represents new funding and how much had already been awarded to Detroit but, for whatever reason, hadn’t reached the city before. But he said much of it represented an effort by adminsitration officials to scour their departments for funding which Detroit could access.

For instance, in the case of $25 million to be used for firefighters, the funding, Sperling said, had “been accumulating for years” but couldn’t be accesed. The $65 million in CDBG funding includes $33 million which had been withheld from the last fiscal year because the city didn’t meet required obligations to access it.

In recent weeks and months, local leaders — from former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer to UAW President Bob King — had visited the White House to talk about what could be done for Detroit, with a federal bailout out of the question.

Sperling said all of the parties have been working to find ways not only to make funds more flexible so they can be used where most needed, such as for demolition, but to figure out ways to ensure that the city has the proper planning and accounting systems to get the funding out to needed projects.

In the months to come, for instance, the White House’s chief technology officer is expected to lead a team of experts to Detroit to make recommendations on how to improve city systems, Sperling said.

“Detroit historically had some major problems deploying grants and other resources, and so there could be a fair amount sort of stuck in the pipeline,” Snyder, who was in Washington on Thursday, told the Free Press. “Financial systems, accounting systems for the city of Detroit? They are a disaster.”

Muckraker Alert: Road to bankruptcy paved in secrets, lies

by Steve Neavling/Motor City Muckraker 

This report is based on hundreds of public records and more than a dozen interviews with state officials and former aides to Mayor Bing. Some of this has been published, some not. This is the whole narrative. 

State and local leaders conspired to plunge Detroit into the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy in a series of surreptitious meetings that began soon after Mayor Dave Bing was elected to his first full term in 2010, the Motor City Muckraker has learned.

In early 2011, newly elected Gov. Rick Snyder and his executive team invited Bing and his aide, Kirk Lewis, to private brainstorming sessions. The topic – devising a strict emergency manager law that would allow an appointed official to break union contracts and privatize services in financially struggling municipalities.

The private sessions, which the mayor and governor had denied took place, marked the beginning of two years’ of secret meetings intended to deceive Detroiters, city workers and other stakeholders about the prospect of a financial takeover and bankruptcy, calling into question whether authorities ever intended to bargain in good faith, a requirement of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

Involved was a surprising array of local and state politicians, including the governor, Treasurer Andy Dillon, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, mayoral candidate Mike Duggan, former Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown and a host of others.

Gov. Snyder finds partner in Bing

Bing and Gov. Snyder hit it off immediately. In early 2011, they agreed the city couldn’t dig out of its debt without state intervention, but neither would say that publicly for nearly a year.

Even Bing wanted to be the emergency manager, former city and state officials said.

Bing and his staff “worked with stakeholders to ensure that Public Act 4 (emergency manager law) contained all necessary provisions to accomplish the goals of the strategy, which included Mayor Bing being named emergency manager for the city of Detroit,” according to a whistleblower suit filed by former mayoral aide Rochelle Collins, who received a quick $200,000 payout to prevent further discovery in the case.

Responding to questions from Motor City Muckraker, Bing acknowledged he met early on with the governor but had no hand in “crafting Public Act 4.”

“Obviously, I met with the governor on several occasions about issues here in the city,” Bing told us. “My job is to protect the city in every way possible. That’s what I did. It was the right thing to do.”

Nevertheless, Bing plowed forward with a plan to establish the basis for state intervention – a $1.7 million Ernst & Young report that showed Detroit was on the verge of running out of money. In October 2011, the mayor violated the Open Meetings Act by gathering privately with the City Council to discuss the report and its impact on the city’s future.

“This was a setup from the beginning,” said activist Robert Davis, who obtained damaging emails that showed state and local leaders cooked up plans for Detroit’s future behind closed doors. “Bankruptcy was the plan since January, and they made deliberate attempts to keep that information from the public.”

To hide his involvement, Bing communicated with Lansing officials through a private email operated by Sue Ray, an administrative assistant who told the governor’s team that she was a “trusted confidante” of the mayor’s and wanted to “stay below the radar.”

The ringleader of the clandestine meetings was Richard Baird, a longtime trusted associate of Snyder who maintains a low profile and is paid by a controversial nonprofit foundation called the NERD Fund.

Mayoral candidate Mike Duggan gets involved

In January, Baird donated $2,500 to Duggan’s mayoral campaign, making him one of the top donors. Duggan privately advised state officials on how best to handle the financial takeover and said he’d be a supportive partner of an emergency manager, if elected.

Duggan also is a close friend of Treasurer Dillon, who sought out the mayoral candidate for advice on state intervention. Duggan was to meet privately with members of the Financial Review Team, which would have violated the Open Meetings Act if a majority of the team was present. It’s unclear whether that meeting ever took place.

But publicly, Duggan emphasized that he was strongly opposed to an emergency manager, never mentioning his role in the process.

The former Detroit Medical Center CEO said he was tapped because of his experience turning around DMC, and he still he was “furiously lobbying not to get them to appoint of an emergency manager.” What he didn’t say was, he lobbied against the appointment until after the election.

“It has become painfully clear that Detroiters were sold on the false hope that bankruptcy would be the last resort, while all along, bankruptcy was always the desired and singular option,” mayoral candidate and frontrunner Benny Napoleon said. “As public officials, if they believed they were doing the right thing on behalf of the electorate, they should have had the courage to make the case for an unpopular decision, not conspire to dupe the voters because they thought we would never find out.”

More closed-door meetings 

As the plot unfolded behind closed doors, five to six city council members met with Dillon and other state leaders. The council was given a coded threat: Work with us on state intervention or we won’t need you.

And so a majority of the council members chose their jobs over public pledges to fight state intervention. While the rhetoric at the council table was decidedly anti-emergency manager, five of its nine members approved critical measures that helped pave the way for state intervention. The council even supported hiring Jones Day, the law firm where Orr worked before becoming an emergency manager.

But no one was more helpful than council President Pro Tem Gary Brown, who often met regularly with state officials and led the drive for drumming up support for state intervention. While Brown still publicly maintained that he opposed the appointment of an emergency manager, he and the state were talking about ways to make the EM transition an easy one.

On July 1, Brown resigned from his council position to accept a $225,000-a-year job working for Orr. By contrast, the mayor is paid about $150,000.

The fix was in

Most of the deception began in November 2012, soon after voters rejected Public Act 4, the emergency manager bill crafted by Snyder. Despite the public’s opposition to state intervention, Snyder’s team was quietly searching for a bankruptcy expert to take over Detroit’s finances.

But in public, Snyder and Treasurer Dillon were still insisting that state intervention was by no means a certainty and appointed a six-member review team in December to determine whether an emergency manager was the best choice.

Behind closed doors, Snyder was hunting for bankruptcy experts and found Orr’s law firm, Jones Day, one of the most renowned bankruptcy experts in the U.S.

On Jan. 31, a Jones Day attorney advised Snyder that bankruptcy clearly was the top choice. But Orr expressed concern that the new EM law looked like it was tailored for a Chapter 9 filing – a position that Snyder has publicly denied.

State officials reassured Orr that the state, along with select Detroit leaders, were engaged in a PR campaign to warm Detroiters to the idea of emergency management. The idea: Don’t mention bankruptcy, pension cuts or debilitating budget reductions. Stay positive.

On Feb.12, Snyder’s team sent Orr a contract and urged him to sign it as soon as possible. On the same day, Dillon and Snyder assured the public – again – that no decision has been made on whether an emergency manager would be the best choice for Detroit.

“Governor already asking me if you can start yet,” Baird wrote that day, saying “our folks are already behaving as if you accepted the job.”

Never mind that the financial review team was still a week from filing its report, which Snyder insisted would be the basis for his decision on whether to appoint an emergency manager, a move that would impact markets, Detroiters and potentially all Michigan residents.

Denials continue after financial review report 

On Feb. 19, the state-appointed financial review team declared the city was in bad financial shape, but Snyder and Treasurer Dillon insisted, yet again, that no decisions were made on whether to appoint an emergency manager.

“The governor is saying he’s not going to make a decision until he studies (the report) and is able to make a thoughtful decision” on whether an EM is needed, Dillon told reporters in Detroit that day.

Snyder’s aide, Baird, set up a clandestine meeting between Bing and Orr for Feb. 25. But it was too risky to meet in the Motor City, Baird warned, because the National Governor’s Association was in town.

“I think the lunch would be better held in our offices for the sake of privacy,” Baird wrote.

Bing’s office agreed about privacy: “We wish to stay below the radar,” his office wrote from a private email account.

On Feb. 21, the governor’s office privately arranged to announce Orr’s appointment on March 14 in Detroit. Hours later, Snyder told the media  that he was unsure whether he was going to appointment an emergency manager.

“It could take weeks before there is a firm decision,” Snyder told me in an interview that day.

In the meantime, his staff was preparing to lease a posh, furnished suite at the Westin Book Cadillac, where Orr would live during his 18-month contract.

Four days later, Baird wrote to Orr that the mayor “was very impressed and enthusiastic about a working relationship.”

On March 1, a few days after the press conference was scheduled, Snyder told me he hadn’t decided on emergency management “because I have to stay open-minded during the review process.”

In interviews with the media, Bing denied knowing anything about the new emergency manager.

Governor’s office denies doing anything wrong

On Sunday, I asked the governor’s office about the discrepancies between Snyder’s public and private comments.

“Good leaders always hope for the best but plan for the worst, and Gov. Snyder believes the state is best served when all contingencies have been considered,” his spokeswoman Sara Wurfel responded. “The governor has been transparent and visible throughout the process and in reaching and sharing his decisions.”

When Orr arrived in Detroit for the official announcement, questions about bankruptcy were quickly dismissed as too early.

“Let’s get at it and work together because we can resolve this without bankruptcy,” Orr said.

Soon after, Orr’s powerful legal team began preparing a 3,000-page bankruptcy filing.

While the EM met with creditors and unions in meetings intended to strike a deal to avoid bankruptcy, participants said the sessions were clearly designed to set the stage for Chapter 9.

“We were very displeased that we were told negotiations were going to take place; they never did,” Al Garrett, President of AFSCME Council 25, said.”Instead, they ran to a bankruptcy court.”

Everything You Need To Know About Detroit’s Fight Between Investors And Retirees

BY ALAN PYKE/Think Progress

Two weeks ago, Detroit filed for bankruptcy protections, saying it is unable to pay back the roughly $18 billion it owes. The bankruptcy faces legal challenges from creditors who say emergency manager Kevyn Orr did not negotiate with them in good faith, and intended to steer the city into bankruptcy court. Emails from the winter involving Orr and state officials seem to support that claim. But if Orr can beat the legal hurdles and have the bankruptcy filing approved by a judge, the city will no longer need the approval of its creditors to repay less than what they are owed.

And then what happens? Here’s everything you need to know about who is owed what and how they might fair if the bankruptcy goes forward:

Who does Detroit owe? Detroit owes money to two broad categories of creditors: secured and unsecured creditors. The first, “secured” creditors, are those whose debt is backed by some kind of legal claim to a physical asset of the city. Detroit’s bond obligations relating to the water and sewer department (DWSD) is the largest example of “secured debt” on the city’s books, with over $5 billion in accumulated borrowing since the early 1990s. The water and sewer bonds are backed by the revenues that the city’s utility company brings in using the pipes built with the borrowed funds. Secured creditors generally get much better deals from bankruptcy proceedings than the organizations that don’t have liens on physical assets connected to the debt. The investment management firm BlackRock says the secured debts will be repaid in full. Indeed, Detroit is continuing to pay its secured debts during bankruptcy.

“Unsecured” creditors, on the other hand, face steep cuts. Detroit’s unsecured creditors include, but are not limited to, the current and former employees of the city – or more precisely, the pension funds that are supposed to pay those workers and their families in retirement. Detroit’s pension obligations are split into two funds, one for police and firefighters and the other for all other city employees. $5.7 billion in health and life insurance benefits for retirees are separate from the pension liabilities and are also unsecured.

The remainder of Detroit’s unsecured debt is owed to investors who bought the city’s debt over the years. Hedge funds have reportedly been buying up large amounts of these unsecured bonds. The bondholders, and the bond insurers who would have to pay out any difference between what Detroit pays and what the bondholders are owed, will have significant incentive to fight any effort to cut their payout. To minimize their own cuts, investors must push to maximize the cuts to pensions and retiree healthcare.

The Detroit Free Press published a list of the 20 largest unsecured creditors in the city’s bankruptcy filing, with the two pension funds in the top two slots – but the numbers from the filing are not necessarily correct.

How far behind is Detroit on funding its pension obligations? Detroit’s pensions are not particularly generous compared with other large cities, and the shortfall owes to a combination of demographics, bad management, andfinancial industry manipulation rather than extravagant promises to workers. The financial crisis also wiped out nearly a billion dollars in pension fund holdings.

But the size of the pension shortfall is in dispute. Before Kevyn Orr was appointed emergency manager, the pensions were well funded. The police and firefighter fund had assets worth 99.9 percent of its liabilities in 2011, and the general retirement fund was 82.8 percent funded. As recently as February, the city was $650 million short on the two accounts. But when Orr commissioned private actuaries to examine the city’s books, that unfunded pension debtjumped to $3.5 billion. Reuters municipal bond market expert Cate Long calls Orr’s calculations “pension voodoo.” Orr used non-traditional actuarial assumptions for his figures, which are supported by some in the profession. But the city’s previous estimates used revenue assumptions of about 8 percent annually, which is in line with the past 25 years of pension fund history and supported by the majority of actuaries.

Yet the actuarial differences alone can’t account for Orr’s figures showing a pension gap five times larger than traditional math shows, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Monique Morrissey. Morrissey notes it’s impossible to check Orr’s math because the accounting firm he hired hasn’t published the “very rough preliminary guesstimates” used to write the emergency manager’s proposal.

What will determine the fate of the pensions? The actuarial dispute determines the size of the debt to retirees that will be factored into bankruptcy negotiations, but the future of Detroit retiree benefits is largely up to federal bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes. Rhodes is still determining whether or not the city’s bankruptcy declaration is even valid, but if Orr’s case clears that hurdle the negotiations that follow over who gets paid when will be subject to Rhodes’ approval. As Ian Millhiser detailed last month, there are various legal obstacles to cutting pensions, including the Michigan Constitution’s specific pension protections. The state’s Republican Attorney General has pledged to defend retirees against cuts.

What is Detroit’s emergency manager proposing for pensioners and bondholders? The only clear blueprint so far for what Orr might seek in bankruptcy comes from a June pre-bankruptcy proposal. At the time, critics said the offer appeared designed to fail. When the city’s creditors rejected the deal, that shored up Orr’s case that he had tried to resolve the city’s finances but had no choice but bankruptcy. So there’s reason to think that the June proposal makes a poor guide to what any final resolution might look like. Retirees and bondholders alike had better hope so: The proposal would replace $11.5 billion in total unsecured debts with $2 billion split among the various creditors. For retirees, the plan includes unspecified “modification of benefits” for healthcare and “significant cuts in accrued, vested pension amounts” for all 30,000 active and retired participants in the system. Even taking Orr’s assertions about pension shortfalls at face value, and assuming “significant cuts” means over 50 percent, pension debts would still eat up more than half of that $2 billion proposal. That would leave little for bondholders – and gives investors and bond insurance companies a lot of reason to fight the bankruptcy.

Rush Limbaugh: Detroit Went Bankrupt Because Blacks Drove Out Whites

BY IGOR VOLSKY AND ALAN PYKE/THINK pROGRESS

Economists are attributing Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing to problems facing the entire Rust Belt region: a shrinking tax base, high health and pension costs, sprawl, and general dysfunction. But on Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh added another cause to the long list of factors that have contributed to the city’s downfall: black people.

During an appearance on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday, Limbaugh claimed that “unchecked” Democratic rule “since the last Republican mayor [in] 1957″ created a lazy and bloated culture of out-of-control spending and corruption.

“You’ve had that — that town has been a petri dish of everything the Democrat Party stands for, everything the Democrat Party loves — massive unions, massive pensions, pay people pensions and health care long after they’ve stopped working,” he said, before arguing that the city’s first black mayor exacerbated the city’s spending and sparked racial riots that chased white people into the suburbs:

LIMBAUGH: You have massive welfare states where citizens are given things left and right in order to buy their votes. You have no opposition whatsoever.

And in the case of the — you throw race into the mix and you bring on Mayor Coleman Young who causes riots in 1967 in Detroit and Mayor Young caused a white flight to suburbia, and Detroit is left with nothing but liberal Democrats running it. It is what it is. And you — any place in this country that has similar circumstances, the same fate is going to happen to them.

First, Coleman Young, who Limbaugh claims caused the riots, wasn’t elected to the mayor’s office until six years after violence broke out, in 1973. The New York Times noted in his obituary that by that point, “Detroit had already been reeling from high unemployment in the automobile industry, a high crime rate and deteriorating housing.” Young also wasn’t a proponent of the kind of welfare policies and “massive pensions,” that Limbaugh attributes to Democrats. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was actually credited with keeping Detroit financially afloat “by persuading city workers to accept cuts in salaries and fringe benefits and voters to approve a $96 million increase in income taxes.” In the late 1990s, the city, still under Democratic rule, even experienced a small revitalization. Household incomes rose, child poverty dropped “by a stunning 13 percentage points,” and homeownership grew.

As for the 1967 riots, they occurred in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, when African Americans across the country were, as a study commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson put it, systematically excluded from the benefits of economic progress and faced “Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing.” The report, which focused on the causes of the violence, found that “white racism,” not Coleman Young, “is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”

The riots of the late 1960s set off “a chain reaction in neighboring communities.” The violence first started in Newark, New Jersey in July of 1967 and later spread to Detroit. “What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens,” the 1967 National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders concluded. “Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.”

Limbaugh is right that white people did leave Detroit in large numbers in the aftermath of the 1967 violence, but that exodus followed a trend of whites abandoning cities as black people moved in and a slowdown in the auto industry. Before the riots, the vast majority of white population growth was already occurring “in suburban portions of metropolitan areas” and white population within the city of Detroit had declined by 1.3 million between 1960 and 1967.

Detroit is Paying Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr a Quarter Million to File for Bankruptcy

By: Black Liberal Boomer/politicususa

The surprise is not that Detroit is filing for bankruptcy. The road signs have been pointing toward this conclusion at least since Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr took the job – and the leash – offered to him by Gov. Rick Snyder.

Strike that.

Detroit has been headed toward bankruptcy for years, because Detroit’s accounts have been screwed for years. Management of Detroit’s finances has been the equivalent of a shell game for quite some time, so those who say that the bill has come due are correct on that point. I am 100 percent opposed to Orr’s appointment, and I will never stop saying that his presence here is illegitimate. Gov. Snyder’s decision to disregard the will of his own voters and force them to accept an EM was nothing short of criminal.

But it would be a lie to say that Orr is responsible for the bankruptcy. As a matter of fact, I suspect the only reason he didn’t move to file on his first day behind the desk was because he had to at least appear to be trying alternative strategies. Strategies like offering to take Detroit’s creditors on a bus ride through the Detroit ghettoes so they could see firsthand how bad things are here. And then, after a good cry, find it within their hearts to forgive all debts because surely no creditor would have the heart to collect on a debt after seeing that the debtor is having a hard time, right?

Yeah. Strategies like that. Well thought-out strategies. Brilliant strategies. Strategies that make it so wonderfully clear why Michigan is paying this man Orr his $275,000 salary; to offer bus rides to creditors. And then, when the creditors decide they’d rather not take the ride because they don’t want their pictures taken and because they would have to sign a form that basically lets the city off the hook in case they get shot or killed or whatever (because, after all, they were going to the ghetto and chances are they would indeed stand out just a tad), then Orr moves forward on what was most likely the plan all along.

Funny thing is, we really didn’t need to pay Orr all this money to file bankruptcy. I’m pretty sure that’s a course of action our own elected leaders could have figured out how to do on their own. And once the bankruptcy is in place, once again, why exactly do we need Orr? Because we’re the biggest municipality to file bankruptcy means we need an emergency manager to make sure everything goes OK?

From the Detroit Free Press:

• If the judge authorizes the city to move forward with a Chapter 9 bankruptcy case, Orr would propose a plan of reorganization. This could take weeks, months or years. Bankruptcy court allows the city to restructure its operations and its balance sheet. This could involve budget cuts, layoffs, consolidation, the sale of assets, slashing union contracts, selling assets and dramatically reducing city debts, including outstanding bonds.
•  The city will attempt to win support for the reorganization plan from creditors, including secured bondholders, general obligation bondholders, unions and pension boards. If the city wins enough support, the plan would be put to a vote — and with enough support, the city could emerge from bankruptcy. Without enough support, the judge could tell the city it must continue to negotiate with creditors.

In other words, we might not even be approved for bankruptcy, which means we’d be back to square one. And since a sizable number of creditors have already signaled they don’t exactly plan to swallow the numbers that Orr  has been trying to feed them then it’s all but a certainty they’re gonna take this fight to the mat. Maybe they’ll prevail, maybe they won’t, but didn’t I tell you this was gonna get real ugly?

Maybe it’s just me, but I thought Orr’s purpose was to be our salvation. To save us from ourselves. To make a way out of no way. For a quarter million dollar salary I damned sure expected more than this, even if he did sign on to assist Gov. Snyder in stealing democracy from his own citizens. You mean to tell me there isn’t even honor among thieves anymore?

In a tweet today, Orr said, “We’re changing the culture of entitlement here in Detroit, Michigan.”

By filing for bankruptcy? Really?

No, Kevyn. Last I heard, we’re still entitled to a democracy. That’s the thing about theft; the rightful owner doesn’t mind putting up a fight to get back what’s rightfully his.

Sharpton:Detroit appointing emergency manger is insult to democracy

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Michigan gives up on democracy

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Romney finds little support in Detroit

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Hundreds gather at Emergency Manager town hall

From Channel 7 WXYZ

DETROIT (WXYZ) - Hundreds of people have gathered for an special Town Hall meeting at the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit to protest the possibility of an Emergency Manager in the city.

Speakers include community leaders and activists.

It comes as the city is in the midst of a financial review that could lead to Governor Rick Snyder appointing an EM to run Detroit.

However, both Mayor Bing and the city council say they are working to come up with a plan that would make the appointment of an Emergency Manager unnecessary.

Government takeover in Michigan

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