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I have been ragging on Detroit
I was especially buoyed by a new charter for the city that
for the first time ever, would mandate electing council members from their own
areas of the city (like wards) and not at-large which basically allowed
Detroiters to elect all members from the core city leaving all other parts of
the city unrepresented. The charter would also help prevent corruption by
making city operations a lot more transparent.
BUT NO…the newly elected council members and other officials
want to keep their jobs and any power they wield and so they are encouraging
Detroiters to vote down the charter, a charter that would, in my opinion, put
the city on the right path to crawling out of the deep black hole it finds
itself in currently.
The officials against the charter are playing the race card
with Detroiters saying that the white suburbs will steal all the city assets
and that type of provocative message works with Detroiters even if their assets
are worthless.
Only hope for the city is for the mayor to come out and sell
the charter which may not be perfect BUT it is a step in the right direction
but so far, he has said nothing.
The newspapers are encouraging passage but they do not hold
much sway with voting Detroiters.
I asked my wife who is a big activist in the city to ask her
friends to exert some energy in passing the charter instead of screaming
against greedy Wall Street?
And that is why as much as you want to be optimistic about
the future of Detroit; you just can’t because Detroiters are their own worst
enemy and until Detroit is re-populated with young, intelligent people that
care for the city and want it to prosper, the city is stuck in a time warp
where incompetence and corruption are the order of the day.
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