 |
Maybe if Detroit made cars as awesome
as ‘Puter’s 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger
again, they’d have remained solvent. |
‘Puter just got around to reading the New York Times Sunday edition, including Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz’ piece on Detroit’s bankruptcy. Mr. Stiglitz may be a Nobel laureate, but his ideas are authoritarian and dangerous, standing four-square against America’s core principles of individual and property rights.
Mr. Stiglitz’ central premise is that Detroit, as a city and not a corporation, should be treated differently than corporate entities facing insolvency. To a point, Mr. Stiglitz is correct. However, the different treatment afforded municipalities is already decided, enacted in Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. §§ 901 et seq.
America is a nation of laws, not men. Mr. Stiglitz would turn this notion on its head, elevating liberal know-it-alls to de factoautocrats, arbitrarily and capriciously determining which groups merit special treatment at the expense of others.
From Mr. Stiglitz we learn the following:
· Detroit’s bankruptcy was caused in part by economic inequality, which Mr. Stiglitz refers to as “economic segregation.” By economic segregation, Mr. Stiglitz means people with the means to do so (primarily Whites) moved out of crappy Detroit neighborhoods leaving poor people (primarily Blacks) behind. You see, when White people leave dangerous neighborhoods, exercising their free will and private capital to do so, the only reason for so doing can be racism.
· Economic segregation “can be even more pernicious than being racially segregated.” In case you were unsure of Mr. Stiglitz’ meaning before, he helpfully calls Whites segregationists for fleeing crappy, crappy Detroit in search of a better place for themselves and their families. It’s irrelevant that Blacks with the means to do so bailed out of Detroit as well for exactly the same reason as Whites did. Detroit sucks, it’s dangerous and it’s no place to raise a family.
· Whites fleeing crappy, dangerous Detroit neighborhoods are racist, because “the rich thus ensure that they don’t have to pay any share of the local public goods and services of their less well-off neighbors, and that their children don’t have to mix with those of lower socioeconomic status.” Not only are Whites fleeing a failed city segregationists, they actively want to screw the poor, Black Detroit residents left behind by razing their schools and infrastructure. Also, Whites hate poor people, so they ensure their children hate the poor as well.
· Economic segregation means poor, Black Detroit children have crappy schools in dangerous neighborhoods. It also means poor, Black Detroit adults can’t get jobs because no employer in his right mind wants to open a business in a violent, dangerous, tax it until it dies municipality like Detroit, much less involuntarily fund a corrupt and inept Detroit government. Again, racist Whites left taking good schools and their businesses with them. But those schools and businesses didn’t leave with the fleeing Whites. Those schools and businesses fell victim to a toxic inner-city poor Black culture that devalues education, hard work and consequences.
· Independently established and decades old municipal boundaries delineating separate political jurisdictions means the poor, Black Detroit people are “geographically isolated” and “politically ghettoized.” Hear that, Whites? You’re not just segregationists for making a rational decision to leave Detroit, you’re the second coming of the Third Reich, forcing Black people into ghettos. ‘Puter awaits Mr. Stiglitz’ death camp analogy.
· Detroit’s Democrat mayor Dave Bing and Detroit’s elected officials have been cut out of the reorganization process and are discouraged. Well, good. Detroit’s public officials are corrupt, incompetent morons (excepting Dave Bing who actually stepped up in a fruitless attempt to save Detroit) who directly caused Detroit’s current situation.
· ‘Puter doesn’t even know what to say about this load of horse manure, theorizing that Detroit’s downfall directly resulted from racial discrimination:
As historians like Thomas J. Sugrue have demonstrated, the disintegration of Detroit precedes the conflicts over social-welfare programs and race relations (including riots in 1967) and reaches back into the postwar decades, a time when the roots of deindustrialization, racial discrimination and geographic isolation were planted. We’ve reaped what we’ve sown.
· The sole explanation for the inability of poor, Black Detroit residents to find and to keep gainful employment is the lack of public transportation. Right. “If only there were high speed rail, inner-city folks would magically develop a work ethic, good study habits and upscale buying habits! Mean old racists in the suburbs won’t dump eleventy-gajillion dollars into a corrupt and failed city! OH NOES!!1!”
· On top of racist Whites fleeing Detroit to screw over poor Black people, Detroit failed because of derivatives, mortgage bankers, the housing bubble and ITZ ALL THE 1%URZ FAWLT!!1!one!! If this is what passes for critical thinking among the economic elite, then ‘Puter’s the smartest man alive, as the one neuron man is king in the land of the dipsticks.
· Mr. Stiglitz has discovered in the Bankruptcy Code what hundreds of thousands of bankruptcy judges and lawyers over the past 30 or so years have missed: a double-secret, ultra-special preference for Detroit’s so-called “social contract” with its citizens. To Mr. Stiglitz, this social contract is simple. Taxpayers must cough up whatever enlightened liberals think poor Black Detroit residents need, probably some hinky admixture of light rail, green energy and better pay for no-work public unions.
· If taxpayers can’t fork over enough money to pay for liberals’ wish list of neato-torpedo ideas of the moment, then it is incumbent on bankruptcy judges to ignore settled bankruptcy law and force secured creditors (bondholders) to take less than that to which they are entitled under the Bankruptcy Code as written. Mr. Stiglitz’ economic genius is that settled property rights may be freely disregarded in order to benefit preferred liberal ends. It’s nice that the Obama Administration, the New York Times and a Nobel laureate economist are all on the same page. After all, liberal economic policies have our economy humming right along.
· Mr. Stiglitz does find one set of contracts, in addition to his super-unicorny and rainbowy social contract, worthy of respect: union pension contracts. All other creditors must be illegally disadvantaged in order to pay in full the self-same bastards primarily responsible for Detroit’s current fiscal woes, public union retirees.
Mr. Stiglitz goes on (and on and on) to summarize his position, but ‘Puter summarizes liberal pet positions better than liberals themselves, and Mr. Stiglitz’ misguided views are no exceptions, so here goes:
Mean, racist white people who are the moral equivalent of either the Klan or Nazis for fleeing a corrupt, costly and dangerous city caused Detroit to fail. Alternatively, greedy Wall Street One Percenters took unfair advantage of grown men and women responsible for minding the public fisc of one of America’s great cities, thereby causing Detroit to fail. Racism and/or greedy Wall Street fat cats conspired to create a corrupt, profligate, idiotic government in Detroit, incapable of providing even the most basic services to “ghettoized” and “segregated” Black Detroit residents. Detroit’s corrupt government spent Detroit into oblivion because racism. Therefore, bankruptcy judges must ignore the rule of law, thereby violating their solemn oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution, and reward the very people that caused Detroit to go bankrupt at the expense of racist and/or greedy Wall Street investors.
Liberal economics ascribe all municipal to two prime (and erroneous) causes: racism or classism. Everything else is just window dressing.
Here endeth the lesson.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.
