Detroit today filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.
What a half-century of Democratic Party rule gets you: Detroit today filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.
Though I personally dislike Democratic Party policies and think they accelerated this disaster, the real problem was a willingness of voters to accept the idea of one-party rule. Not once during those fifty-one years of continuous and disastrous Democratic Party rule did Detroit voters even once consider the idea of firing these guys to give someone else a shot at running the city.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
What a half-century of Democratic Party rule gets you: Detroit today filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.
Though I personally dislike Democratic Party policies and think they accelerated this disaster, the real problem was a willingness of voters to accept the idea of one-party rule. Not once during those fifty-one years of continuous and disastrous Democratic Party rule did Detroit voters even once consider the idea of firing these guys to give someone else a shot at running the city.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Pittsburgh has been run by Democratic politicians for fifty years as well.
Why is Democratic Pittsburgh thriving while Democratic Detroit is bankrupt?
Remember: the truth is the truth even if you find it to be personally distasteful. Reality is what it is even if it contradicts your most cherished beliefs.
Sooner or later, like it or not, we will all be forced to face the ugly truth, and acknowledge reality as it is.
Third world governance equals third world results, banana republic! Is it any wonder industry leaves!
The estimable Mr. Zimmerman undoubtedly understands Karl Popper’s notion of Falsifiability. For example, while no experiment can ever prove Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, a single experiment could, at least in principle, disprove it.
One can think of many cities that have had virtually uninterrupted rule by Democrats for decades. The example of Pittsburgh is certainly a provocative one, especially given that that city and Detroit each lost its main industry at about the same time and for more or less the same reason, foreign competition, although their fates have diverged considerably since then.
But there are other instances. Seattle’s last Republican governor left office in 1969, and San Francisco’s in 1965. And Boston has had uninterrupted Democratic rule since 1910, three years before the start of the First World War.And compared to Detroit, all of those cities are doing reasonably well.
So we may consider Mr. Zimmerman’s contention that one-party Democratic rule brought about Detroit’s downfall to be Falsified in the Popperian meaning of the term.
There must be another factor at work. What could it be?
Pardon the math error. Nineteen-ten is of course four years before the start of the Great War.
I would disagree with you that San Francisco and Boston are “doing reasonably well.” I would say that both are doing comparable to New York. All have had ups and downs, but the general trend in terms of quality of life has been downhill steadily.
In New York, the ups have generally occurred when the worst aspects of hard leftwing Democratic politics have been stymied, either by a more common sense mayor (Ed Koch) or by a hardnosed smart Republican (Rudy Guiliani). Even so, New York continues to trend down because the voters there cannot really tolerate a real two party system. We need only witness the corrupt individuals who are leading the polls in the present race.
I think that much the same pattern applies to Boston and San Francisco. As for Pittsburgh, there are many factors involved, including the possibility that the Democrats in that city have avoided the worst and most radical big government schemes seen in other blue-state cities.
The operative phrase is “compared to Detroit.” And compared to Detroit, all of those cities are doing reasonably well, just as, say, Greece is doing reasonably well compared to Moldova. And Moldova is doing splendidly compared to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
You will probably get the ban hammer here.
No one wants to read your crap.
Why would I be banned? I haven’t done anything other than express an honest opinion on the topic under discussion. An unorthodox and controversial opinion, yes, but an honest and open-minded individual like our host has no fear of those.
I understand your anger. It is a hard thing to face the fact that everything you have ever been taught is wrong. I myself often wish that things were different than they are. For what it’s worth, I find the truth about the fall of Detroit, and America’s other great cities, to be just as ugly and unpleasant as you likely do.
But truth is truth. Reality is what it is. And we, as honest men, must face and deal with reality as it is, not as we might wish for it to be.
“I understand your anger.”
I am not angry, I look on you with pity and a little disgust.
“It is a hard thing to face the fact that everything you have ever been taught is wrong.”
And what would that be?
Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean instead of playing cowardly word games?
“Why would I be banned?”
Oh, after reading a few of your comments, then clicking your name, it wouldn’t surprise me if our host asked you to move along.
Thanks for your opinion.
While you may in general associate a party with financial “success” but that does not necessarily correlate the two. If one city is bankrupt because of mismanagement and another city is financially sound, that only means that the other city was managed in a more judicial and financially sound way.
But it is well documented that a more liberally managed, “progressive” (democratically controlled) city, state or country is on a collision course with financial reality.
(My personal conclusion ? They are all lying.)
So IMO Shibes, your observation is flawed, its something I call convenient logic. It serves a purpose, your purpose.
Cities don’t get much more “progressive” than Portland, Oregon, and yet that Democrat-run city is doing reasonably well also, at least when compared to Detroit. What makes the Leftist fruitcakes of Portland different from Detroit’s? Ranging farther afield, Stockholm makes Portland look like a hotbed of Reaganism, and yet the Swedes there seem happy with their lot.
Why are some left-wing, progressive, Democrat-run, or (in the case of Stockholm) even quasi-Marxist cities nice places to live, whereas Detroit is for all practical purposes a post-apocalyptic ruin? Ideology does not even begin to account for the disparity. Again, what explains the difference? Is it the weather? Something in the water? How about elevation above sea level?
You can’t show a man something he refuses to see.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” Sinclair Lewis wrote, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
In Dinesh D’Souza’s movie, George Obama laments that it would have been better for the British to have stayed in Kenya than to have left when they did as this would have left Kenya more developed! In a way, the same thing has happened to Detroit, small business dares not open doors there and many businesses have left because of crime and safety, no major grocer has a store in Detroit, only middle eastern and Iraqis (Chaldean’s) have grocery stores and those people are very much despised by the local population, it is sad to drive through those areas in Detroit outside of the downtown area and look at the decaying landmarks, to drive through many areas of Detroit is to take safety into your own hands.
Shibes, you think that you have discovered an irrefutable scientific explanation disproving the fact that a city irresponsibly run, (hell Detroit was a gang operation under Qwamy), in regards to its finances is, in the long term to say the least, bad. And you believe (in your delusion) that if you post your own paradigm changing “observation” on a scientifically oriented site that you will change the world and the opinions of reasonable people. Good luck.
I would be willing to bet that when you heard the president further inserting himself into the recent Zimmerman (the other Zimmerman) verdict in order to support Mr. Sharptons efforts of protest this weekend that you were pleased.
First off to compare Detroit to Pittsburgh is pretty good but not really close.
When the auto industry started to decline in Detroit the owners of those great businesses no longer lived in that city. The people with money didn’t stay to remake a business.
Why they left has several varied reasons not the least of which are the unions influence and the climate.
You have millions, why stay in Detroit? Why not move to the west coast were the weather is so much better and at the time the unions didn’t have as much influence.
Pittsburgh survives because of diversification and cheap land. Detroit was out of cheap land and refused to diversify. All they wanted were union automotive jobs and that is all they reached for.
Pittsburgh, because of a far better relationship with its rich citizens, reached out to them and worked to get them to stay.
Pittsburgh was also not a single industry entity to begin with. When the steel industry went down they worked at keeping the coal industry working, as that goes down they are nurturing new small business growth.
Those west coast cities should be doing far better than they actually are. They have experienced incredible growth in the last 60 years and despite this they are still operating in the red. They should be flush with cash each and every year. Floating on a sea of black profit but they are not.
The west coast has been propped up by their nice weather, in the past cheap housing, and fully artificial promotions by Hollywood. But now the cheap housing has gone away and the only thing Hollywood promotes if inner city LA with its myriad of gang problems. California is now giving the movie industry tax breaks to keep them there, knowing full well that if that golden goose goes away so will the last chance of them staying solvent.
If I was lifelong democrat I would be embarrassed that Detroit was allowed to get to this point in the first place. Detroit is so far in the hole that even if they sold all of Detroit they couldn’t pay it off.
Proudly pointing to other democratic cities that have so far not filed for bankruptcy (but are on that same path) is not good. You should be finding the real reason Detroit was allowed to get this far. And that reason sits totally in the laps of the Democrats. They had a thousand chances over the years to reach out to other democratically controlled cities for help and advice and failed to follow up on it. Why?
Detroit was an city grown from a single industry. In a single era. The auto industry in the post war era. Once the baby boomers all had their cars they started looking for alternatives to the offerings of Detroit. They wanted better and cheaper.
For a while the boomers were willing to pay what ever the car dealers asked. The dealers were willing to pay what ever the manufactures asked and the manufacturers were willing to pay anything the unions asked for.
But all of a sudden the boomers wanted something different. They wanted cheaper cars, safer cars, more fuel efficient cars, prettier cars, and just something different for some. American manufacturers could not provide all this and thus we got imports. And it took 30 more years for American manufacturing to catch up to the imports.
It was a nice ride but in that thirty years Detroit fell like a mighty colossus.
It was the changing attitudes of the Boomers, they wanted something new and Detroit was their dads generation. It was old and tired.
Heute Detroit, morgen die Welt.
The lame stream media generally refuse to cover this kind of behavior, they also refuse to state race when they do talk about violence as in Milwaukee fairgrounds violence, I guess that must be PC!
Nevertheless, the facts are there to see — for those who are no longer willing to close their eyes and play “pretend”.
I have reread your posts and I really don’t know that you have said anything other than Pittsburgh is doing well financially and Detroit is not and they were both run by the Democrats. And then you say ” if your unable to understand those facts, you can’t do anything about it”.
That’s it?
That’s like saying Warren Buffett is a Democrat and he is worth 70 billion dollars and Kwamey Killpatrick, who is also a Democrat are the same because they are Democrats and both should expect similar outcomes related to their activities. In your world are they the same? Have they made the same decisions in life? Do they run under the same philosophy of operations?
If its possible, could you elaborate on your position to more completely support it?
Your attempt at disingenuity is charming, but it has failed. I am confident that you know very well what I am saying.
And that is precisely my point. Everyone knows that what I am saying is true. We simply cannot (or dare not) admit that it is true, in many cases not even to ourselves. And so we hide behind anger, or ad hominem, or we pretend not to understand. Anything is better than admitting what we all know to be true is in fact true. Because admitting the truth in this case means that our deepest and most cherished beliefs are simply wrong, and that the Bad Guys were right. Admitting to the truth in this case means becoming one of the Bad Guys.
And we can’t have that. We want to be the Good Guys, even if it means denying reality as it is. And so the great game of Pretend continues.
My friend, I think I’ve said more than enough in this thread. Our host has been gracious enough to permit me to comment honestly here and I don’t want to abuse his permission. If you are truly unable to grasp the message I am attempting to propagate here, I can only ask you to click on the link and read what you find there.