One video clip is worth a million words.
Even in the depths of the Great Depression this type of squalor wasn't tolerated. This is Joe Biden's America in a short video clip. https://t.co/Zkf0fyRw3E
— orionscoldfire (@orionscoldfire) May 27, 2023
Tag: Dysfunctional Democrat Cities
Black People Are Safer in Chicago Than Florida?
The author of this American Greatness post makes the point that the NAACP is as shamelessly absurd as it possilby can be when it selects Florida as the place where black people are most at risk in America.
Obviously if you look at Chicago (or Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Atlanta, St Louis or Kansas City) more black people are being murdered, assaulted, raped, robbed or condemned to hopeless poverty than in Florida where law and order and economic opportunity still exist. The only thing that’s missing in Florida is the leftist propaganda that blames all of that blue city dysfunction on Republicans and white people.
The NAACP is a racket that blames black misery on everyone but who deserves it; the Democrat Party and the enablers in the black community that benefit from it.
Friends to the Rescue
Ah, freedom. There’s nothing like it. The air smells fresher the food tastes better. Even the damn birds sounded happier. I walked out of a meeting this morning with the prospect of doing whatever the hell I want to do for next four days. Finally.
Recently I talked about how the blue cities are on a trajectory to become like Detroit. Coincidentally I read an article in a rag called Financial Times that claimed that the cities were currently suffering from a similar problem to what happened to Detroit.
“For decades, the beautiful Detroit downtown buildings of the late 19th and early 20th century stood nearly empty, thanks to a combination of racism, the loss of US auto-industry predominance, rising crime and violence, and white flight to the outer rings of the city.”
I love how the primary reason cited is racism. Rising crime and violence is third. So, the solution to the problem in the article is to turn the empty commercial space in New York and Chicago into residential and small business commercial space.
It’s like the woman who wrote this article is from Mars. Hundreds of thousands of people have left New York and large numbers have left the other blighted cities since the George Floyd riots. But she wants to fill up the empty glass and steel skyscrapers that fill downtown and midtown Manhattan, some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, with coffee shops and struggling actors? Apparently, the author of this article watched too many episodes of “Friends” and thinks there are millions of Joey Tribbianis lining up to move back into the city.
And probably only actors and drug dealers are currently crazy enough to want to move into Manhattan. Everyone else is either stuck there or getting out. So, what gives?
Well, this is a finance magazine. It’s currently predicted that the next financial sector that will succumb to the stagflation economy will be the commercial real estate market. It’s natural that these finance types are hypothesizing how to prevent all of that value from evaporating when the bottom drops out of the urban commercial real estate market.
Of course, it wouldn’t occur to them to discover that the last time these cities were blighted by crime and violence the solution was voting for a law-and-order mayor and letting him restore order and prosperity to New York City. That was Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s. I guess that’s too far back in ancient history for these geniuses. Or maybe it’s just not allowed to think about anything like that.
The mindset of the writer of this piece is interesting. She wants us to think that turning commercial real estate into rental apartments is a winning idea because a part of downtown Detroit has followed that idea and has “recovered somewhat.” But downtown Detroit is no success story and it is a sad remnant of this former city of almost two million people. Not since the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths has a more thorough job been done destroying a city.
But I think we could be seeing what the outcome will be for these cities. Ruling out the rule of law and order we are left with creating a rump New York or Chicago in the center of the downtown where a small remnant of the city can exist, subsidized by billionaires and guarded by private security guards. But Tribbiani better watch which way he walks when he leaves the Central Perk or it could be his last cup of bad coffee.
Chicago Police Officially Give Up
The hot weather must have stirred up the blood of the youth of Chicago so they went on a rampage.
“Hundreds of teens cause fiery chaos in Downtown Chicago as they torch cars in rampage organized on social media: Vastly outnumbered police manage just 15 arrests.”
It appeared as if police were unable to handle the crowd and were seen escorting innocent bystanders and tourists to safety.
Mayor Lightfoot said while many of the young people gathered to have a good time and enjoy the weather, some were involved in ‘reckless, disrespectful and unlawful behavior.’
So burning cars, assaulting passersby and shooting each other is reckless and disrespectful. That’s a very revealing interpretation. What would it take for her to call it a riot, mass decapitations?
Lightfoot noted that Chicago police leadership has assured her they will ‘make the necessary adjustments to address these teen trends issues as we move into the summer months.’
But the most telling statement comes from the mayor-elect, Brandon Johnson:
“It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities,” he said. “Our city must work together to create spaces for youth to gather safely and responsibly, under adult guidance and supervision, to ensure that every part of our city remains welcome for both residents and visitors.”
TRANSLATION:
Go ahead burn the city down I’ve got your back just keep voting for me and you can do whatever you like.
So this is before the new mayor takes office. Can you imagine what will be going on by Juneteenth? The devolution is moving along nicely. Maybe Mayor Johnson doesn’t even get through the first year of his term before he throws in the towel and calls for Illinois to enact martial law. Either way we’re getting a ringside seat to the next stage in Joe Biden’s America. Well, it’s a hell of a ride.
Chicago Boldly Declares Its Future: Detroit
Yep. In their election yesterday of the “progressive” choice, Chicago voters (or however it is that they decide these things there) picked the candidate who thinks law and order is racist. So on with the descent into hell. Probably this election should be enough to empty out Chicago of anyone who loves their children.
After all, four more years of gang-bangers and car-jackers running the city should be enough to convince even those not paying attention that Chicago will be kind of tough on kids. What with a school system that doesn’t teach, an open-air drug market on every corner and a race war brewing in the streets you’d have to be an idiot not to get your kids the hell out of there. So, Chicago will become like Detroit, a city of those who can’t get out. The criminals will feed on the weak and the strong will become the political leaders and feed on the weak and misery will dominate a once great American city.
But that’s the dynamic. The Democrats have their people and they will keep them in charge regardless of how miserable conditions become. So be it. Democracy says it respects the will of the people no matter how stupid it is. We might as well too. We’ll see how this pattern plays out. All the larger urban centers, especially those in the blue states will probably follow suit.
Now, how does this election impact us? Only as a confirmation that we are beyond thinking that the consequences of the Left’s policies will convince people to throw them out of office in the areas where their natural constituencies predominate. This is the evolution of dependency that began with the Great Society programs of the 1960s; whole cities and even regions made up of nothing but people subsisting on welfare.
The parts of the country we need to consider are the ones where there are enough people left who still want a future. These are the places that may have a chance to head off the same fate. To do this they need to strictly enforce immigration laws and limit welfare benefits to only the truly deserving. Doing this will be an enormous struggle against the full power of the federal government pushing for the opposite of these policies. Florida and some of the other red states are the test cases for this. The struggle will be for them to get their cities under control, even against the will of the “democratic” majorities within them. If they can’t then eventually the functional population will be outnumbered by the non-functional urban dwellers and these states will become blue states. And they will join Chicago and Illinois.
There you have it. Another data point in the evidence of our decay. In the same week we had Donald Trump victimized by the anarcho-tyrannical nincompoop that George Soros installed as Manhattan’s district attorney. And Wisconsin elected a progressive state supreme court justice to tip the balance of that court progressive. Everything moving along nicely toward the hive future we’ve been promised. Let’s hope there are a few good men who plan to put up a fight. But we won’t find them in Chicago.
Fixing the Cities
So, the cities that have been devastated by their lousy electoral decisions are beginning to recoil against their suicidal choices.
In Chicago a law and order choice is emerging to challenge the pop-eyed lunacy of Lori Lightfoot. In San Francisco a recall vote is poised to remove their criminally negligent District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office. Do I find these developments hopeful or encouraging? Not at all. The people in these cities are absolute fools. Any temporary respite from the insanity they are currently experiencing will bring them right back to the same positions on police and criminals that got them into their present disaster.
When they recall their district attorney, they’ll substitute an idiot that’s just one click less absurd than Boudin. And if Lightfoot is replaced with a law-and-order mayor the city council and the rest of the establishment will work to undermine the authority and actions of the new mayor.
No, there’s no shortcut to fixing these cities. They will have to hit bottom. It will have to get so bad that the liberals will be forced to run away. That will leave the remaining poor people with the chance to learn from their stupidity and act sanely.
But even in red states and with blue cities this lunacy also exists. It seems to me that if there is ever to be an end to all this dysfunction, a state government has to initiate new laws to intercede where local governments have failed their citizens. So, the governor of Texas should see what’s going on in Austin or some other blue Texas city and intervene when its local government enacts some crack pot legislation that harms its own citizens. Whether it’s allowing homeless people to invade a neighborhood or declaring itself a sanctuary city for illegal aliens or electing a district attorney that refuses to prosecute felons the state should have a plan to override these activities and even prosecute elected officials who enact such insane things.
Something like that should have been done during the George Floyd riots. Large mobs of looters and arsonists should have been confronted by National Guard units and been warned to disperse or risk arrest or worse. I guarantee they would have disappeared into the night, never to be heard from again.
The first governor who starts thinking, talking and acting this way will be vilified by the press and acclaimed a hero by his own citizens. And it’s a cinch that he’d be copied by twenty other red state governors almost immediately. Who knows, there might be a few blue states that would elect a copycat republican governor who ran on a similar platform of cleaning up the urban decay and taking strong action against criminals and lawlessness.
But this is happy-happy talk. We’re nowhere near any of this. The appearance of a strong man willing to stand up to Washington and take drastic action against anarchists and urban progressive lunatics hasn’t come to fruition yet. DeSantis has taken the first steps. He’s challenged some of the blue cities on specific points but he hasn’t taken them on head on. Maybe his state doesn’t have those kinds of cities. I’d assume that Miami would be like that but maybe I’m wrong. But when we start to hear about that kind of strong action against progressive lunacy then we’ll know something real is happening in the country. Let’s hope it starts sooner than later. We could use it.
Brilliant Leftist Journalists Reveal What’s Wrong with Dying Leftist Cities – Too Many Police!
In this pair of articles,
Minneapolis Is About to Vote on Whether to Dismantle the Police
The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next?
written by leftist loons, we are educated by the authors on how it’s not the fifteen months of riots, murder, arson and robbery that have made their cities hellholes that tourists avoid and residents flee for safer places. It’s actually the police that are the problem. And remember these two cities, Portland and Minneapolis are governed by the most anti-police city governments in America. Both cities are actively working to dismantle their police departments. So effectively there is no policing going on in either city. The police, such as they are, barely make their presence known. They wait until the crimes have occurred and show up to record the details for police reports that can be used by the victims for insurance purposes and to direct the ambulance or morgue truck to the bodies, living or dead. But the articles are clear that it is systemic racism that is killing these cities. Although the Portland article is clear in telling us that Portland is safe and vibrant. It’s only prejudice and racism that is spreading the false impression that the city is a dirty, abandoned shell of its former self, filled with homeless encampments and homicidal drug addicts.
These articles are very long so you might want to skim them. Better advice is just skip them. I’ve done the public service of reading this crap for you. I think the take away I got from these articles is that even in the leftist bastions of Portland and Minneapolis it is getting difficult to sell people on the “defund the police” narrative. They try, they really try. We get thousands of words about policing being slave control and Jim Crow and blah, blah, blah. But I think they’re trying to sell all this to people who just want their lives to go back to normal. And not just white people. Minneapolis has become very dangerous. And that has been noticed by the black neighborhoods. The change impacts everyone. The white neighborhoods have seen an enormous increase in property crime but also things like carjackings. But it’s in the black neighborhoods where things have gotten out of hand. So, it will take a lot of talking in circles to convince the black population in Minnesota that they really want to get rid of the police.
Portland is one of the whitest big cities in America. Their problem is the enormous homeless population. Druggies come from far and wide to live in a place that reflects their values. When there was a working police force, it could be kept under control. Now that’s gone. So, you have antifa and BLM rioting, the homeless defecating in the streets and addicts robbing you at knifepoint but Portland wants people to think it’s a “vibrant” and safe place to visit and live. It turns out that’s a hard sell.
It will be interesting to me to see if these two cities are able to convince their residents to get rid of their police. Maybe they can. Leftists are very good at ignoring reality. Maybe they can make it happen. But if they do, I’d guess that the size of these cities will shrink way down. Most people want to live in a place where they are safe. And this goes double for families. It takes a really hard-core leftist to be willing to let her kids be victims of street crime to prove a point. But the writers of these articles sound like they just might be crazy enough to try. It does indeed take all kinds.
So good luck to you folks in Portland, Minneapolis and of course Chicago and New York. You’ve made your bed and now you get to sleep in it. Enjoy.
Walter Williams Points to the Real Problems for Black Americans and It Isn’t Racism
Williams is an economics professor and also happens to be black. He points to the fact that the cities that are burning have been run by Democrats and in may cases black Democrats for decades. Of course the Media will ignore this and just keep shouting Racism! So what else is new?