The Detroit bankruptcy? It was only a matter of time. Detroit, the wealthiest city in the world 50 years ago, the center of the American dynamo that produced the materiel that won World War II, is now essentially a Third World city or, rather, a post-apocalypse city.... a bombed out wasteland where warlords fight for the last remaining scraps. Bankruptcy is a relatively mild remedy for an essentially irremediable human tragedy.
Compare the devastation caused by the 9/11 bombers in lower Manhattan to the devastation in Detroit -- it isn't even close. But where there was a demand in the aftermath to hold people accountable for not "connecting the dots" that would have predicted the catastrophe of 9/11, there is precious little reckoning for the people who caused or permitted the destruction of a major American city. And connecting the dots in Detroit is so easy. What caused the catastrophe? Two generations (since the 1960s) of liberal rule created a business climate so poisonous that manufacturing companies simply said "no more." Two generations of dominance by public employee unions made Detroit essentially ungovernable. Two generations of a liberal "war on poverty" created a permanent black underclass. You couldn't have collapsed civil society faster or more completely if you had tried. But where we essentially declared a War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11's destruction, in the aftermath of liberalism's destruction of entire cities and even states... Detroit, Chicago, Illlinois, California... no one connects the dots to hold liberalism accountable.
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