Leftover turkeys ( The Michigan View 11.27.11)

Posted by hpayne on November 28, 2011

You can’t find the solution unless you know the problem. Yet, as Detroit teeters on the brink of bankruptcy this Thanksgiving holiday, its pundit class continues to gobble, gobble, gobble like a pen of confused turkeys.

Detroit is getting the stuffing knocked out of it because:

1. An 80 percent illegitimacy rate has destroyed the two-parent family – the absence of which is the Number One cause of poverty in America – feeding the three-headed pathology of illiteracy, unemployment, and crime.

2. The middle class has fled as a result of #1.

3. City government maintains the region’s worst city services with the region’s highest property taxes, extinguishing incentive for #2 to move back into the city.

4. Public employee union costs are unsustainably high, putting increasing pressure on a budget that shrinks with the flight of the middle class tax base because of #1.

As fundamental as dribbling, shooting, passing, and screening is to basketball, so are those fundamentals to understanding how to turn around Detroit.

Yet, in a remarkable, wing-flapping reent feature called “Living with Murder,” the Detroit Free Press never once addressed any of them. Not once. Instead the paper organized a “community forum” so that people can “talk” about “solutions.” Like “encouraging urban gardening” and “increased access to transportation.”

We’re not making this up. Family destruction has created an assembly line of murderers preying on Detroit citizens and city elites organize gabfests. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

The Freep is not alone. National media routinely find hope in Detroit without getting to know the team or its lack of fundamentals. Take Forbes magazine which, in a June 29 cover story, called Detroit the “City of Hope.” Again, we’re not making this up.

Detroit quickly made a chump out of this prediction with a spectacularly bloody summer followed by this fall’s budget crisis. Of course, little of this was foreshadowed in reporter Joann Muller’s fairy tale which ignored Detroit’s core problems by interviewing Detroit celebrity businessmen about the region’s business comeback – a largely suburban phenomenon divorced from the gritty reality of Detroit proper. Only Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert really looked at the city itself – focusing on his own heroic efforts in downtown Detroit’s one-square mile business district.

The city’s other 137 square miles? Ignored by Forbes.

Then there are city boosters like James Melton, a Detroit-based columnist with the Northstar Writers Group, who takes MIView contributor and Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley to task for having the audacity to point out that Detroit’s gobbling leadership is dooming the city to financial failure.

Melton’s solution? “Regionalism.”

“Regionalism gets started when we recognize that the lines on the map of southeast Michigan are imaginary,” writes Melton. “The middle class people who fled the city over the past half century did not, I hate to tell them, flee far enough. Like it or not, we’re all in this together. But whether you realize it or not, you are missing something – a lot of things, in fact. More power is generated simply from the magic of urban density, which brings together people and ideas in unexpected ways.”

Got it? Me neither. But he would have been very comfortable at the Freep’s happy talk community forum session. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

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