Atlas Shrugs. Obama flaps in the wind. Detroit and Gary fall apart.

Did you hear that Detroit, Michigan and Gary, Indiana were named among the MOST LIBERAL cities in the USA?   You are aware that both of them are falling apart?   Just checking...a note from The Foundry

Morning Bell: Detroit’s Liberal Nightmare

                Author: Mike Brownfield

Posted March 24th, 2011 at 9:26am in Ongoing Priorities 

What happens when a city buys the liberal dream hook, line and sinker? Just take a look at the City of Detroit. The once-great city lost 237,493 residents over the last decade according to the 2010 Census, bringing it to 713,777 – a population plunge of 25%. That’s its lowest population since 1910, and it marks the city’s fall from a 1950s peak of two million, over 60%. And that’s just the people who can afford to leave.

Detroit, once known as “the great arsenal of democracy,” has made headlines of late for its notorious fall from grace. The “Big Three” automakers are no longer the biggest, falling behind their overseas rivals, and the Michigan economy lost 450,000 manufacturing jobs over the past 10 years all while Detroit lost population. And while the Motor City suffers unemployment from a decimated automotive industry, it suffers crime, high taxes, poor city services, plummeting home values, and a public education system in shambles with a $327 million budget deficit and a 19 percent dropout rate. Is it any wonder people are leaving in droves?

But to understand why folks are really leaving Detroit, it’s worth looking where they’re headed. As Detroit suffered a population loss, its neighboring suburban counties with lower crime, better schools and an improving economic outlook saw their population increase. One former Detroiter told The Detroit News, “Detroit just got too messy for me … I was not getting the benefits of those tax dollars. The city services are poor and I could not use the school system. And you look at the cost of living and the corruption, we had to leave.” In other words, bad government drove her out, and she’s seeking greener pastures elsewhere.

For the record, Detroit has been under liberal leadership for decades. And the city’s big problem today is that its road forward is blocked by the very same political machine that helped deliver it to its state of ruin. Case in point: the state’s powerful teachers unions. In 2003, a philanthropist pledged $200 million for the creation of 15 charter schools in the city. Despite the city’s tragic public school system, the plan failed and the offer was withdrawn following protests by the Detroit Federation of Teachers. Little has changed, eight years later. A state-appointed emergency financial manager has proposed sweeping changes to the city’s public school system, including a plan to convert 41 of the city’s schools to charter schools. Guess who’s opposed to the reforms? That very same union.

The newly elected governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder (R), is finding opposition to his efforts at reform, as well. Following eight years of Democrat Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s rule, Gov. Snyder has embarked on efforts to change the way the state does business, including tax reform, spending cuts and empowering emergency financial managers to tackle problems in cities and schools. Who’s opposed to his reforms? Unions, once again, in Wisconsin-style protests. William McGurn of The Wall Street Journal writes:

Michigan today is not a struggling state like California or New Jersey or even Wisconsin. It is a basket case, with worse to come if things do not change quickly—especially in the relation of the public to the private sector.

“Many of the protesters seem to think the war is between rich and poor,” says Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative at the Michigan-based Mackinac Center. “But the real class war today is between government and the people who pay for it. And the government’s been winning.”

And the problems that plague Michigan and Detroit are the problems with liberal policies. The promise doesn’t live up to the results. The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone writes: “When people ask me why I moved from being a liberal to being a conservative, my single-word answer is Detroit. The liberal policies which I hoped would make Detroit something like heaven have made it instead something more like hell.”

And now, after living in that liberal nightmare, Detroiters have voted with their feet in record number.
Quick Hits:

• Deep divisions among President Obama’s Libya coalition worsened today as the German military announced it is pulling forces out of NATO over continued disagreement on who will lead the campaign.
• Adm. Gary Roughead, the Chief of Naval Operations, admitted yesterday that he has received no guidance on the path ahead for command and control of the Libya no-fly zone, no-drive zone, no-sail zone, arms embargo enforcement, and any other missions currently being managed by the United States.
• U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday there was no “timeline” for when UN-backed military operations in Libya would end, and that the outcome of the conflict remained unclear.
• On the first anniversary of Obamacare, Crossroads GPS filed a lawsuit seeking transparency on the Obamacare waiver process.
• Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) predicted yesterday that the Supreme Court will find Obamacare unconstitutional, allowing him to push for single-payer health care.

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It is the small, medium and large businessmen and innovators and job producers who make this country great and the economy go by providing JOBS and GOODS and SERVICES.  Barack Obama cannot understand this.   He thinks we should all be peons serving the elitists who, after all, know better than we do.    So he produces three times as much debt as George Bush ever did, presides over more military deaths in Afghanistan in two years than Bush saw in eight and see unemployment climb to ten per cent while gas/fuel prices double, so of course the cost of everything goes up!  Does he know what he is doing?   If not, he is the empty suit being manipulated by the George Soros brigade we feared he would be.   But if he does?   That might even be WORSE?

I hope you go see this movie.   I will!

Common Cents posted this article below. .

Atlas Shrugged - The Movie Trailer:

Who is John Galt?  Finallly it's here - the The 1957 tome which champions Objectivism--Rand's controversial philosophy--has managed to find its way to the big-screen despite numerous challenges along the way. But at last, thanks to John Aglialoro, who bought the rights to the book in 1992 and has been trying to get it on-screen ever since, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is here.  The official homepage to Atlas Shrugged.

PJTV interviews people walking out of the theater after seeing Atlas Shrugged.

"I've been waiting for this movie to come out for decades"

"It was worth the 50 year wait"

 IBD's editorial on Atlas Shrugged is superlative!

Individualists and money grubbers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your servility and confiscatory tax rates.

After all these increasingly collectivized decades, "Atlas Shrugged, Part I" the movie, is finally coming to town. It opens nationwide, appropriately, this Friday — Tax Day. Check your local listings for the time and place.

"Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's legendary novel, was published in 1957. Instead of focusing on the old tale of victimized workers and greedy owners, the story turns the tables and shows what happens to the world when the innovators and producers go on strike, when the capitalists and owners turn out the lights and disappear.

The question has been asked on billboards, T-shirts and bumper stickers for half a century: "Who is John Galt?" In "Atlas Shrugged," he's the man who initiates and leads the strike of the producers.

"There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history," states Galt in the novel. "Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable — except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. "Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind."

The shrugging comes when men of achievement refuse to accept their unearned guilt, refuse to have their strengths and accomplishments turned into weaknesses and sins.

"All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues," Francisco d'Anconia says to successful industrialist Hank Rearden in the novel. "You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements.

"You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.'

"Have you stopped to ask them: by what right? — by what code? — by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent."

Posted by commoncents at 4:15 PM 0 comments