So, you are advocating for the removal of elected officials from public office when their city is in financial crisis? How about states? Heck, how about federal representatives from the states? Hard to argue that anybody is more screwed up than the federal government right now. The bafoons we have in office have certainly made quite a mess of things -- massive debt, high unemployment, unsustainable programs that will guarantee things will get worse in the future, a high percentage of people living below the poverty line. It goes on and on. Should the president step in and nullify the votes of state citizens who sent these bafoons to Congress? Where would he draw the line? Somewhere below Bachmann? Cruz? How bad to they have to be before someone replaces them? Who decides? Shouldn't the president send someone of his choosing to take their place so he can save the moronic citizens of Minnesota from themselves? Things would surely get done more quickly. That's what the country wants, right? We'd probably have a cohesive plan put swiftly into action. Nah, we can't do that. That would simply be an outrageous abuse of executive power. And so it is in Michigan.
I'm normally more accepting of state's acting to get their state in order than the federal government stepping in to do
anything. Simply put, I trust a state government 80 miles away acting over a federal government 450 miles away (in Detroit's case).
I'm not a big fan of what is happening in Detroit. It's a ****** situation. But if you had to give me two options, this or the course Detroit was on, this is the one I would pick. Detroit is in a desperate situation and the state feels that it has to take desperate measures. Detroit has had several years to fix its fiscal situation, and they didn't do it.
I think it's pretty difficult to make a judgment on this until one reads about the shocking corruption Detroit has had in recent years. In 2001 they elected a
31-year old Kwame Kilpatrick to run the show; he immediately tanked the city and ran up over $210,000 in personal entertainment, meals, and travel charges in less than three years. Yet somehow, he was reelected on that whole "half-black mayor" election. He used the race card against a black guy, and won. That's how messed up Detroit is. His family, I believe, once likened whistle-blowers at the Mayoral Mansion to Jewish lies about Germany in the 1930s (lol wut). To top it off, he dropped n-bombs in a State of the City speech in 2008 in a pathetic attempt to regain the people.
Detroit has some of the saddest race relations in the country. The suburbs and the city have populations that vehemently oppose one another, and the economic downfall of the situation has only exacerbated things. Whites blame the blacks for moving in and letting their old neighborhoods fall into disrepair, and blacks blame the whites for moving out and taking their investment with them.
When Ford tried to integrate their factories, they put just a handful of black guys on the line and 25,000 whites walked out that very day. The race relations haven't gotten much better. Couple that with backroom deals with public sector unions (some of the most corrupt in the country), and an ignorant mayor/council getting destroyed in negotiations for other bills...and you've got a situation that absolutely requires an outside authority.
This is, for all intents and purposes, the nuclear option. And it was started, for the record, by Democrat Gov. Granholm years ago. Hopefully the state will create a regional government with tax sharing so proper investment can flow into the city once again, but before that the governor's man (Kevyn Orr, who is a life-long Democrat and black) has to undo more than a decade of outright fiscal abuse. The kind of fiscal abuse that got Kwame Kilpatrick convicted of twenty federal felonies a week ago, after the FBI launched an investigation to prove that Kilpatrick was illegally awarding city contracts to relatives and friendly companies. That's the sort of stuff Michigan is undoing. It should be over in eighteen months, Kevyn Orr is the same guy who lead Chrysler's 2009 bankruptcy team that saved the corporation and, wait for it, helped Detroit in the process. He's a Michigan alumnus, son of a pastor, black, and a Democrat. Detroit will learn to love him, even if its has to go the hard way.
EDIT: Kwame Kilpatrick sure looks like he knows how to operate one of the largest cities in America:
