I dont think anyone outside this region has a clue who Kwame even is.
I dont think anyone outside this region has a clue who Kwame even is.
LOL... yeah sure everyone knows who Kwame Kilpatrick is... and they try not to forget him... and according to what happened back in 2008... they remember to steer miles away from him....
"In March 2008, the National Conference of Black Mayors moved its meeting from Detroit to New Orleans due to Kilpatrick's legal travails."
It appears everyone with half a brain has been steering well clear of the Kwamster....
Strip his name and his crooked hero coleman young's name off of all City property.
and strip McNamara's name off everything too
It may appear that way to the masses. What you didn't see was that life was getting better because Kwame [[and all of city government, for that matter) was doing it on borrowed money, running up the credit card bills to fund all of this quality of life stuff.
I don't want to get into tons of economic analysis on this because it's thick, heady, and boring. Here are the Cliff Notes:
When Kwame was in office, we had access to credit, housing prices were stable, and revenue at the state level was flush, and so was the amount they shared with the cities. Not just Detroit... all over.
The Wall Street disaster with securitized mortgages destroyed us in 2008 and 2009, after Kwame was gone. This wasn't our fault, but we sure paid like hell for it. And the state needed to correct its books....one way they did it was by cutting off the spigot to the cities. All cities.
Whether you think Bing is doing a good or bad job in all of this isn't really the point. The point is that the Kwame was keeping the ship afloat using solutions that were like band-aids over a gushing wound. He was in negotiations to sell the Detroit/Windsor tunnel. They were funding deficits with bonds. [[Deficits they inherited, btw...I'm not pinning all of this on Kwame.) If there was economic growth, then we could pay off the loans with future income.
But alas, not only did the economic growth fail to come, a tidal wave of economic disaster pummeled us left and right. I'm not saying Bing made the right moves, but I will say that he was elected Captain of a ship that was already sinking and headed toward disaster.
The argument that "Things were getting better under Kwame" is like analysis at 7-year-old child's level. Who were they getting better for? Why were they getting better?
This is like the whole Cobo Hall deal. You'll hear people say, "Well once the Cobo Authority took over, all the black-owned business were told to leave."
That's true. And that's very painful. But guess what? Cobo was 24 months away from totally going out of business. So all those black-owned businesses were going to have to leave anyway.
I'm not saying Kwame caused all the problems. But corruption drives away the one real solution that Detroit needs above all: Economic Growth. So although he didn't cause the problems...he made some big bets to cover his political behind...try to reduce suffering along the way, keep quality of life high on borrowed money, in hopes that a boom of businesses would be able to keep it all afloat.
It never came. And now we're paying off the gambling debt along with loss of credit, character assassination, political credibility, etc.
Those things aren't as sexy as "quality of life". But in the long run, you can't compromise that stuff and still expect the money to keep flowing.
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