Bloodthirsty Liberal

It’s a natural cycle: cities that once sprang up around industry should naturally fade away as the supporting industry does. In the west, they’re called ghost towns.

In the midwest, they’re called Detroit:

There’s a new driver grabbing the wheel in the Motor City.

He’s not an elected official, or a local business titan. He’s not even a Detroiter.

He’s Rip Rapson, president of the $3.1 billion Kresge Foundation, and his combination of ambition, political connections and financial resources has made him a powerful force in the effort to remake a city much of the country wrote off a generation ago.

Under Mr. Rapson’s watch, Kresge has invested more than $100 million in Detroit’s transformation, funding a riverfront promenade, building greenways and backing incentives for entrepreneurs. And he’s just getting started.

“Philanthropy has emerged as the sector best able to provide the long-term vision and shorter-term investment of capital the city needs to right itself,” Mr. Rapson said at a private gathering of urban experts in Detroit this spring.

That foundation-knows-best attitude exasperates Mayor Dave Bing and City Hall officials, who have sought to reassure Detroiters that their voices, not outsiders, will guide efforts to rebuild the city.

“Everyone talks about Kresge, Kresge, Kresge,” the mayor said in an interview. “We’re pleased with the support we’re getting from them, but… Kresge is not doing this in a vacuum by themselves.”

Mr. Rapson dived head-first into city politics last year when Kresge agreed to fund Detroit Works, Mr. Bing’s signature campaign to consolidate the city’s shrinking population into healthy neighborhoods and re-purpose vast tracts of vacant land. Kresge also put up $35 million to spark development of “M1,” a light-rail transit line down Woodward Avenue, the spine of the city.

Both initiatives are now in limbo. Kresge stopped funding Detroit Works at the start of the year after disagreements with City Hall over the role of outside consultants. The foundation also is rethinking its support for the rail line amid a separate spat with city officials.

I like Dave Bing: he’s a Hall of Fame basketball player. I like Detroit: it’s where my grandfather lived out his final years (until the riots, when he moved to the suburb of Southfield); the ’68 Tigers were my first favorite baseball team, Al Kaline my first favorite ball player. But government is what got Detroit into this mess. Government and the economy and a dying automobile industry and the overweening power of the unions, to be fair—but it was government’s failure to encourage a diversification of industry, by cutting taxes and regulations to encourage new business, that was the real downfall of the city. Dead Man’s Gulch, Arizona, didn’t have a lot to sustain it after the gold mines were cleaned out; Detroit did. Or should have.

Whatever attracted Kresge to Detroit is a mystery to me: the city’s been dying for decades. Maybe the allure of being a white knight (so to speak) riding to the rescue made the mission seem noble. The best that can be hoped for Detroit now is a drastically downsized city: vast tracts of land sold off and a smaller hub within. A two-bedroom ranch, from a six-bedroom gothic revival.

And even on that they can’t agree. The city (predominantly African American) resents being told how things are going to be by someone wielding Kmart money. Which is fine—even as it should be in a democracy.

But that money isn’t going to be there forever. The will to revive a dying city isn’t going to be there forever. Maybe beggars can be choosers—but dead men tell no tales.

Some have talked about this, but I’m having trouble getting my head around it.

Detroit was once the fifth largest city in America; now it is 18th. From its peak in 1950 (pop. 1,849,568), it has lost over 60% of its population (713,777 in the 2010 census), 25% of that in the last decade alone.

And while Detroit is still overwhelmingly black (82%), even the black population has fled the city in about the same percentage as the population as a whole.

And that may be the good news:

Akinya Khalfani, who has run his own small planning firm since leaving the city’s recreation planning department in 2002, projects Detroit’s population to hit bottom at 500,000 in 2016, the same date Detroit Public Schools has projected its student population will fall to 50,617. The school system had 168,213 students in 2000.

“A half-million, that’s the core of the population that can’t afford to leave,” said Khalfani, of the Southfield-based Central Place Planning Professionals.

“At that point, when we bottom out, even the service industries like fast food restaurants won’t have enough people in the city with disposable income to support them. At that point, the population is so poor, so poorly educated and spread out that the city becomes an urban prairie, a wasteland,” the Detroit resident added.

…

“This city now is the center of an unnatural disaster that is a harbinger of what could happen to other cities,” Metzger said. “There are a lot of funders now looking at Detroit for experimentation, to see what can happen to turn a shrinking city around. What can be done has been done in New Orleans. With these new figures, you will see more federal and national effort and attention turn to Detroit.”

New Orleans, which was struck by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is the only U.S. city with more than 100,000 residents to have a greater percentage decline than Detroit. New Orleans dropped 29 percent, losing 140,000 residents.

I honestly don’t know how to analyze this. Detroit has been overwhelmingly black for decades, but other overwhelmingly black cities aren’t basket cases like Detroit. Birmingham, Jackson, Baltimore, and Atlanta—all roughly two-thirds to three-quarters black—aren’t swirling the drain. And New Orleans was swamped by a one-a-century natural disaster, Ray Nagin. Maybe it is Detroit’s over-reliance on one industry, auto manufacturing. But people haven’t stopped buying cars.

I suspect there is something in the combination of single party politics—the Democrats—and union membership. Remember, as GM and other car companies faced bankruptcies, then and only then did the unions give up some of the perks like the so-called jobs banks—which were funds paid to unneeded workers in lieu of salaries.

But the “reprimitivization” (a word and concept I learned from Mark Steyn) of Detroit is complete. The only thing Mayor Dave Bing (one of the greatest players in NBA history, and therefore a hero of mine) has contemplated is contracting the remaining Detroiters more densely and turning vast tracts over to farm land.

Maybe:

All sorts of commercial agricultural plans have been offered to the city, from a proposed winery on Belle Isle to the Hantz Farms and RecoveryPark projects. Proponents say the project will do more than grow fruits and vegetables; they say farming will create a local food-based industry with jobs and tax base coming from food processing, agritourism and the like.

But the proposals are on hold until the city deals with two main issues — Michigan’s Right to Farm Act and Mayor Dave Bing’s Detroit Works planning project.

The Right to Farm Act bars municipalities from curtailing farming operations already under way. It was designed to protect farmers from suburban sprawl. Detroit officials worry that it will keep them from regulating operations like Hantz Farms once they get started.

Meanwhile, Bing’s planners have yet to decide whether they want to make large-scale commercial agriculture part of the city’s redevelopment efforts under the Detroit Works Project.

Meanwhile, others are even more desperate:

Gov. Rick Snyder reissued his State of the State call for increased immigration, telling Muslim leaders gathered in Lansing last week that Michigan’s diversity is a selling point for businesses.

New numbers show there are between 300,000 and 400,000 Muslims in the state.

“The nice thing about Detroit is it has a lot of vacant land and cheap housing stock,” Vogel said. “The resourcefulness and energy of immigrants has always driven economic opportunity in this country.”

That’s true, but only up to a point. Immigrants can enliven an area, but the area has to have a pulse first. It’s not clear Detroit does. And let’s be honest with ourselves. Muslims are welcome contributors to American society, but they number only about one or two percent of the population of America. Given the very real and not at all bigoted concerns over home-grown radicalism among some American Muslims, is an enclave of disadvantaged Muslim immigrants in a failed city really such a good idea? I ain’t convinced.

Wither Detroit, certainly. But whither Detroit?

Take decades of poverty and misery; shake; add plenty of cholera and let sit.

Sprinkle with UN and other western imperialism and serve!

Feeds none.

Here’s the $64 million question: Is Haiti’s seemingly intractable misery the result of a society and culture that is incapable of organizing itself to create civil order and a viable economy? Or is it the consequence of ruling kleptocrats—abetted or at least tolerated by influential foreigners—treating every economic transaction in the country as an opportunity for personal enrichment?

Evidence abounds that it is the latter. So why have the U.S. and the U.N. refused to take even small steps toward shutting down an official corruption racket that pushes millions of helpless people into lives of desperation? Instead they’ve put Bill Clinton—whose political family famously went into business with the notoriously corrupt former President Jean Bertrand Aristide—in charge of rebuilding the country with billions in foreign aid.

…

Haitians are fed up with the squalor that seems to promise an end only in death. They are angry not only with their own crooked politicians but with the way in which outsiders turn a blind eye to their tormentors. The fact that Washington and the U.N. have refused to rein in the extortionists running the port demonstrates the lack of international political will to alter the status quo.

Even I, who hate the UN with a passion and anger greater than that for any organization not the New York Yankees, have a hard time blaming it for Haiti’s wretchedness. But I’m willing to listen!

Some of you may find my interest in Haiti a distraction from my pom-pom waving for Israel or my brick-throwing at President Obama. Not so.

Haiti is a living (barely) example of society gone wrong. It should be studied as much as it is pitied. And if there is blame to go around for its reprimitivization, that blame should be scooped up and rubbed in the face of the responsible parties.

I know what you’re going to say: that I really have to stop this unseemly fascination with Zimbabwe’s utter misery. It’s not good for me, not good for you, I really have to move on.

I will, I promise—tomorrow:

Cash-strapped Zimbabwe revealed plans Saturday to circulate $200 million notes, just days after introducing a $100 million bill, Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi said.

After the $100 million note began circulating on Thursday, the price of a loaf of bread soared from 2 million to 35 million Zimbabwean dollars.

Amid allegations of illegal foreign currency trading, the government also fired top executives at four major banks Thursday, according to The Herald, a state-owned newspaper.

Many anxious residents of the nation’s capital, Harare, have been sleeping outside banks, waiting for them to open so they can make withdrawals before the institutions run out of cash. Watch how Zimbabwe’s children are suffering »

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had capped maximum daily withdrawals at 500,000 Zimbabwean dollars: about 25 U.S. cents, or about a quarter of Thursday’s price of a loaf of bread.

Last week, restrictions on cash withdrawals — due to severe money shortages — triggered riots.

This is called—pay attention now, class—”reprimitivization”. When a civil society breaks down completely, and man is thrown back into a state of nature, and life is nasty, brutish, and short (such small portions!).

But it’s like Halley’s Comet or a solar eclipse: how often do you get a chance to see it?

At least our curiosity has its analytical side: CNN has been stuck on 231,000,000% inflation for some time now. But inflation is anything but steady—so where is it really?

Here:

Zimbabwe is the first country in the 21st century to hyperinflate. In February 2007, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate topped 50% per month, the minimum rate required to qualify as a hyperinflation (50% per month is equal to a 12,875% per year). Since then, inflation has soared.

The last official inflation data were released for July and are hopelessly outdated. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has been even less forthcoming with money supply data: the most recent money supply figures are ancient history—January 2008.

Absent current official money supply and inflation data, it is difficult to quantify the depth and breadth of the still-growing crisis in Zimbabwe. To overcome this problem, Cato Senior Fellow Steve Hanke has developed the Hanke Hyperinflation Index for Zimbabwe (HHIZ). This new metric is derived from market-based price data and is presented in the accompanying table for the January 2007 to present period. As of 14 November 2008, Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was 89.7 Sextillion percent.

Let’s see: that’s 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%—as of three weeks ago! It might be in the octillions by now. (Go for googol, Zimbabwe!) Cholera is about all anyone there can afford.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop. I admit I have a problem—nothing like Zimbabwe’s, but still a problem.

Mark Steyn refers to himself as a “demography bore”—and he is, but a fascinating one. So I guess I’d have to call myself a “reprimitivization bore”. I have an unnatural and unhealthy obsession with watching civilization go down the toilet.

And, yes, I mean Zimbabwe, where their lack of toilets and clean water are two prime examples of their once-thriving, robust economy and society now at the bottom of the privy.

Police in Zimbabwe chased away residents from long bank queues and arrested several trade union leaders Wednesday to head off a protest against limits on cash withdrawals in the inflation-ravaged African nation.

…

A day earlier, the country’s former defense minister appeared on television, flanked by two top army officials, to warn the union groups against holding the protests, the spokesman said in a statement. The former minister, Sidney Sekeramayi, accused the unions of colluding with solders who went on rampages in the capital twice in recent days.

The angry, unpaid soldiers clashed with foreign currency exchangers and some civilians Monday. And on Friday, soldiers also looted some shops they suspected to be illegally dealing in foreign currency after failing to get cash from their banks.

Queuing up to withdraw money has become a daily sight in the country that is facing an acute shortage of cash, and the money that banks give out sometimes is not enough to purchase basic necessities.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe allows a maximum daily withdrawal of 500,000 Zimbabwean dollars — the equivalent of about 25 cents in the United States — as a way to ease the country’s acute cash problems. The amount is not even enough to pay for a loaf of bread, which costs about 2 million Zimbabwean dollars ($1 U.S.).

Yesterday, we noted that Zimbabweans could withdraw 50 pence a day, enough to buy one banana. Those days—that day—sound like they’re long gone. At a quarter a day, they’ll be lucky to buy a grape.

Who needs apocalyptic movies when we have BBC World News?