"He takes your checkbook, he takes your credit cards, he lives in your house and he sleeps in your bed with your wife. . . . He tells you it's still your house, but he doesn't clean up, sells off everything and then he packs his bag and leaves." -- Donald Watkins, City Council member in Pontiac, Michigan, in "Lessons for Detroit in a City's Takeover."
'An emergency manager is like a man coming into your house...'
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Thu Mar 14, 2013 11:58 AM EDT
— Filed under: michigan
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Don't they call them carpetbaggers?
In Detroit, they are known as the Conyers family.
I'm not from Michigan, can you give a little info on them?
So can I say "2nd Amendment remedies". Or as ALEC calls it the "Castle Doctrine".....
Don't get mad, I'm just saying - cause if it was democrats doing this I'm sure that the right would be saying the same things.
John Conyers has represented the city in Congress for 47 years during which he made rough back of the envelope calculation a minimum of 4 million dollars in nominal terms alone, (1.6 million in just the last ten years) yet he claims to have only a house valued at $100,000 or so and a net worth of less than that.
This is in addition to his wife Monica the former president of the Detroit City Council until her recent unfortunate incarceration for corruption, who made a salary of about $90,000 a year.
Now I don't say that he's as good as Mitt Romney at hiding assets, but a combined salary of $265,000 in a city where they sell houses for as little as dollar, would seem to leave you better off than reported, wouldn't you guess?
Please explain how GM is coming back and yet Detroit is supposed to be bankrupt -- this seems like a conflict to me
I liked your first post. The misspellings made it more in keeping with the ideological sentiment behind it.
I am sorry but I don't type much and I did not grow up using computers so this may sound ideological to you, but I was serious. I assume if GM is doing well than they are paying workers who are doing well. Both are paying taxes. So why is the situation getting worse instead of better?
just fyi - most of the cars 'made in detroit' are actually made in the suburbs, not detroit proper. there are a few still made 'in' detroit - chevy volt i'm pretty sure, jeep wrangler maybe? - but the vast majority of detroit's industry is outside of the city limits. also, there's precious little public transport, so if you live in the city and have no reliable transportation of your own, you can't really make it to the burbs where the better-paying jobs are. and none of the detriot 'elected officials' (mayor, council, etc) have had any real interest in fixing the problems that they have.
granted, i'm overly not fond of the idea of the governor taking control of detroit - i think he's probably gonna screw the hell outta the town - but i do think that something needs to give. we have a similar situation in a burb near mine (pritchard, al). it's got serious issues, that can be fixed, but some of the fixes will be heinously unpopular short-term - like raising some of the taxes to hire more policemen to cut down on the crime rate, etc. they had a mayor that was trying his best, and making a difference, but he was voted out after one term because he was unpopular. never mind that there was nearly 60% less crime, or that job rates were rising, or any of the other things that he'd done. some of his policies are still in place, but the majority of them have been tanked.
detriot has the same sorts of issues, compounded by major corruption in the government. i don't overly like the idea of a governor being able to override the will of the people on matters that are (or should be) democratic, but sometimes a hole gets dug deep enough that you have to hire an outside agent to come fix the problem. and some of the fixes will be unpopular, like in pritchard, and so there has to be a way to either keep the fixes in place long enough to actually work, or something. so. . . i dunno. . .
I was tracking with the analogy until he got the the "sleeping with your wife" part.
Who's the "wife"? If it's just sleeping, why does it matter.
Or is he admitting that he was doing something else with/to the "wife" before?
I'm suddenly feeling REAL bad for the people of Detroit.
Khrysavek seems to suggest that Detroit has a habit of voting out honest men who clean up the influence peddling and corruption. That happened in DC. After the emergency manager came and went, DC elected Anthony Williams, a straight-talking man who laid off massive portions of the overpaid, under-worked, under-qualified city bureaucracy including a total enema of the city's MVA. Following him was Adrian Fenty who brought in Michelle Rhee, the tough broad that close underpopulated, expensive schools compressing that last bastion of the bloated DC government workforce down.
The teachers unions then made darn sure Fenty got the boot and their boy, Vincent Grey dismissed Rhee as the first thing her did, no exaggeration. He is now hip deep in election financing scandals, influence peddling and a corrupt bidding process for city contracts.
Will DC wise up and bring back someone like Anthony Williams? For their sake I hope so.
No city prospers by taking tax money and handing it off to hangers-on and sycophants.
If Detroit gets taken over, I hope they find leaders who will not promise jobs for votes the way Marion Barry and Vincent Gray do. There's no other way that path can go but decay and decline.
You forget, williamjacobs (and Khrysavek) this is a repub- written law - emergency managers are not allowed to raise taxes. They can, however, sell off the city's assets to their cronies, unilaterally change or modify contracts and collective bargaining agreements, and of course, offer no-bid contracts to private companies.
Peas explai how GM is coming back along with the other auto industry players and yet Detroit is supposed to bebankrupt
Only the headquarters of GM is in Detroit. The big 3 do not build cars in Detroit any more. In my home town our police department bought Chevy Caprices built in Australia. The entry level wages at GM plants are now $16.00 per hour. Detroit can not rebuild with out jobs and with wages that are only slightly above poverty levels.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-17/gm-said-to-increase-entry-level-uaw-wage-by-2-to-3-an-hour-1-.html
I thought it was interesting to read the caption of the photo in the link at 3.1:
It's very odd to me that we operate this way now. We build a car to be exported to Europe in Detroit. We have foreign cars made in the U.S. and the European Volt is made in Detroit.
I still want a Volt, but the price is more than I can pay now.
This is how Republicans take over government positions in places they can't even gerrymander their way into.
True enough. Republicans are taking democracy from Americans.
What are you all going to do about it? Complain? That's not helping.
A very apt analogy! Even those that support EM can understand. I have no doubt they would still look for "excuses" for supporting it.
It's the charter school concept taken to a more extreme level. Like charter schools, repubs have been able to convince at least some people that if they just hand over control of a public institution to a private interest or a single person, accountable to no one, you will end up with much better results. Of course, when we look at the actual accomplishments of charter schools, we find that they often perform no better, and sometimes worse, than the public schools they compete with or replace. The emergency managers seem to have done no better than charter schools. If anything, they have done worse, as none of them has apparently shown any measurable success.
What! The party of free stuff ran another city into bankruptcy! I am so surprised!
And the GOTP continues to show its true anti-democratic, dicatatorial leanings by tossing out democratically-elected officials and turning governance over to one man who is accountable to no one, but who will most likely sell things off to corporate donor cronies, with the result that things will get worse, but the rich will get richer and everyone else will get their pockets picked. Fixed it for you, blanks.
The Emergency Manager of Pontiac sold the Silver Dome for about a half million when it was valued at 23 million and then came back and tried to open a casino with the man to whom he sold the Silver Dome.
Who is the party of free stuff again?
Actually, it's the citizens of Detroit themselves who take those things, if the city's politicians happen to miss any of them.
The Nazis appointed "administrators" to regions they had conquered: they were called Gauleighters - most notorious were those running Czechoslovakia and The Netherlands, among many other unfortunate territories controlled by that regime. Neither administrators, nor the administrated, fared well. But, what does knowledge matter, or history, for these learned beings elected to govern. The electorate gets the government it deserves, but the conquered did not elect their Gauleighters.