Pile another embarrassment on heap: DTW pols pay for support
Jai-Lee Dearing, the serial candidate for City Council, is right about one thing -- political interest groups demanding cash as a pre-condition to support particular candidates is all about Detroit's "culture," as he said in an eye-opener in today's Detroit News. Which doesn't make it right.
What does it say about the poorest major city in America, a place where half the population is functionally illiterate, that political action committees openly shake down candidates for four-figure contributions? What does it say about the practice when the candidates who can't pay never hear from the groups again? What does it say about Detroit that experts in urban politics claim they know of no other major city where such a questionable tactic is commonplace in local electoral politics?
It tells me that Detroit's politics are so broken that folks don't know a cultural failing when they see one. This is embarrassing. Again. It's a marker of political rot. Again. It symbolizes the environment that delivered Kwame Kilpatrick, encouraged a mostly inept City Council, enabled Big Labor to control the public purse, created a school board that confused micro-management with governance, that wrangled over contracts for vendors and unions while the kids languished and their parents steadily left.
The worst part: Where's the outrage? Doesn't it strike Detroit voters (and the rest of us who pay taxes to the Motor City but can't vote) as, at a minimum, suspicious that prominent political groups expect to have their collective palms greased before they're willing to hoist a sign for their favorite candidates (who, by the way, bought their support with a donation)?
It isn't right. Candidates for public office, in Detroit or anywhere else, should attract and win support based on their records, their experience and their ideas -- not how many $2,000 PAC payments they're able to muster in a bid to buy support. The vacuousness of the practice speaks for itself, and it speaks volumes about Detroit.
Comments
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'Pile another embarrassment:' Uninformed misses Metro handle
What the hell does DTW stand for?? No where in your blog do you give the entire name. As a former newspaper journalist I give you an F in composition!
MG:
You can give me an "f," but I refuse to take it. Ever flown in or out of Detroit? DTW is the international designation for Detroit Metropolitan Airport, which used to be "Detroit-Wayne." Hence, the handle. Thanks for asking.
-- DCH
'Pile another embarrassment:' Uninformed voters beget 'dumbest' elected officials
You are on target as usual. Only problem with this column: Most of the people it's directed at can't read. It's a perfect example of the Detroitification of America. More and more illiterate people are simply pulling a lever based on slogans and zero reading or thought about the candidates or their background, there by giving us the dumbest possible people elected to serve.
BC:
Spot-on. The problem isn't information. It's an appalling lack of critical thinking and what voters do -- or don't do -- with the information as we speed down the slippery slope. In Detroit, in the 'burbs, in Michigan, in the nation -- doesn't matter. The willing suspension of common sense, of recognition that government money (with the exception of Treasury printing dollars) actually comes from one place, and one place only: private-sector jobs.
Voters are free to be ignorant. They're free to elect pols who will demagogue business. They're free to elect pols who'll pursue policies that will pull more dollars into public coffers and aggregate government power at the same time. They're free to elect pols who show they don't understand, by their actions, how incentives work in a market economy or how business people make decisions on hiring and firing, investment and expansion. But voters also are free to pay the price, as the nation did in the 1930s. Business held its dollars, reduced investment and delayed hiring. They called it the Depression.
-- DCH
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