Baltimore Riots/Freddie Gray (6 Viewers)
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Then it's the government's fault for not giving them more handouts 
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-blue-city-model-1430263661
The Blue-City Model
Baltimore shows how progressivism has failed urban America.
You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.
Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.
The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.
The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.
Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else—e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.
Opinion Journal Video
Best of the Web Today Columnist James Taranto on riots following the death of a black man in police custody. Photo credit: Getty Images.
People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.
It’s not that we don’t know what to do. Rudy Giuliani proved that in New York City, which he helped to revive in the 1990s starting with a revolution in policing that brought crime rates to record lows. A good part of this was policing in areas that had previously been left to the hoodlums.
His reward (and that of his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who built on Mr. Giuliani’s policies) was to become a villain of the liberal grievance industry and a constant target of attack. Few blue-city mayors elsewhere have been willing to take that heat.
Or take the economy. In the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the idea was that the federal government could revitalize city centers with money and central planning. You can tell how that turned out by the office buildings and housing projects that failed to attract middle-class taxpayers. Baltimore’s waterfront is a gleaming example of this kind of top-down development, with new sports stadiums that failed to attract other businesses.
The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray—the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots—reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.
Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so—and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.
Our point is not to indict all cities or liberals. Many big-city Democrats have worked to welcome private investment and reform public education. Some of the biggest cities—New York, Boston and San Francisco—have also had inherent economic advantages like higher education and the finance and technology industries.
But Baltimore also has advantages, not least its port and one of the nation’s finest medical centers in Johns Hopkins. If it lacks the appeal of New York or San Diego, that is all the more reason for city officials to rethink their reliance on high taxes, government spending and welfare-state dependency.
For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization. In some places it did.
But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, “broken windows” policing, and education choice.
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Europe, are we doing it wrong?
Baltimore shows how progressivism has failed urban America.
You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.
Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.
The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.
The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.
Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else—e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.
Opinion Journal Video
Best of the Web Today Columnist James Taranto on riots following the death of a black man in police custody. Photo credit: Getty Images.
People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.
It’s not that we don’t know what to do. Rudy Giuliani proved that in New York City, which he helped to revive in the 1990s starting with a revolution in policing that brought crime rates to record lows. A good part of this was policing in areas that had previously been left to the hoodlums.
His reward (and that of his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who built on Mr. Giuliani’s policies) was to become a villain of the liberal grievance industry and a constant target of attack. Few blue-city mayors elsewhere have been willing to take that heat.
Or take the economy. In the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the idea was that the federal government could revitalize city centers with money and central planning. You can tell how that turned out by the office buildings and housing projects that failed to attract middle-class taxpayers. Baltimore’s waterfront is a gleaming example of this kind of top-down development, with new sports stadiums that failed to attract other businesses.
The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray—the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots—reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.
Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so—and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.
Our point is not to indict all cities or liberals. Many big-city Democrats have worked to welcome private investment and reform public education. Some of the biggest cities—New York, Boston and San Francisco—have also had inherent economic advantages like higher education and the finance and technology industries.
But Baltimore also has advantages, not least its port and one of the nation’s finest medical centers in Johns Hopkins. If it lacks the appeal of New York or San Diego, that is all the more reason for city officials to rethink their reliance on high taxes, government spending and welfare-state dependency.
For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization. In some places it did.
But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, “broken windows” policing, and education choice.
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Europe, are we doing it wrong?
So your analysis of the situation and why there is little investment in these areas starts from 29-04-2015? That is the root of my sarcasm. I'm no expert in American social history nor will I pretend to be, so I can only speak from a general point of view that you can not show me societies that are so marginalised as ghettoes/projects are in the states and point the finger solely at the people living in them - despite the fact that their negative contribution to the situation is the most visible one on a day to day basis.
Now there are several things you could undertake to improve the situation, depending on your political orientation. The first place you guys could start is to reevaluate the discourse when talking about people on benefits, it's almost exclusively negative which contributes to the behavior of certain groups within this. Social empowerment is nonexisting in the states. The minimum wage is one that is barely acceptable for anyone who contemplates to break out of the negative social heritage in the American projects, of course partaking in crime from an early age seems more appealing than working the worst possible jobs for a pay that doesn't give any incitament when you see how easily money can be made by breaking the law.
Your argument is pretty much "look at them, they're acting like animals - of course people won't invest in the areas" whereas the situation is much more complex and (if we discount the libertarian concept of encouraged altruism) needs to be tackled from the government through various programmes that will help break the negative spiral.
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Such bull. On every parameter the scandinavian countries are blowing the states out of the water, except profitability for transnational companies. Who still chose to do business here despite their lower margin of profit - if anything that is an argument for tightening the noose around them further as our legislation on this area is way too flabby still.
You refuse to import utilize certain parts of a clearly succesfull strategy because of "culture"? That my friend is a cop-out of epic dimensions simply because you disagree with the idea behind an somewhat egalitarian society.
Now there are several things you could undertake to improve the situation, depending on your political orientation. The first place you guys could start is to reevaluate the discourse when talking about people on benefits, it's almost exclusively negative which contributes to the behavior of certain groups within this. Social empowerment is nonexisting in the states. The minimum wage is one that is barely acceptable for anyone who contemplates to break out of the negative social heritage in the American projects, of course partaking in crime from an early age seems more appealing than working the worst possible jobs for a pay that doesn't give any incitament when you see how easily money can be made by breaking the law.
Your argument is pretty much "look at them, they're acting like animals - of course people won't invest in the areas" whereas the situation is much more complex and (if we discount the libertarian concept of encouraged altruism) needs to be tackled from the government through various programmes that will help break the negative spiral.
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Such bull. On every parameter the scandinavian countries are blowing the states out of the water, except profitability for transnational companies. Who still chose to do business here despite their lower margin of profit - if anything that is an argument for tightening the noose around them further as our legislation on this area is way too flabby still.
You refuse to import utilize certain parts of a clearly succesfull strategy because of "culture"? That my friend is a cop-out of epic dimensions simply because you disagree with the idea behind an somewhat egalitarian society.
Of course. My argument is looking to the future with an idea of the current situation and everything that led up to it, including crime rates, failed policies, etc. They keep electing officials that continue down this path that leads these troubled communities into the abyss. Nothing changes for them, only the politicians with the same policies. As a business owner would do their homework before starting a business, you want to be in a safe community with reasonably intelligent people. You don't see that in many areas of Baltimore. I think Enron said there are only 3 really nice areas of the city and everything else is "meh".
I didn't think I had to elaborate on something so obvious and I wasn't expecting sarcasm but as I told swag yesterday the first person to attack any of my posts here will either be Belgian or Danish.
I didn't think I had to elaborate on something so obvious and I wasn't expecting sarcasm but as I told swag yesterday the first person to attack any of my posts here will either be Belgian or Danish.
Of course. My argument is looking to the future with an idea of the current situation and everything that led up to it, including crime rates, failed policies, etc. They keep electing officials that continue down this path that leads these troubled communities into the abyss. Nothing changes for them, only the politicians with the same policies. As a business owner would do their homework before starting a business, you want to be in a safe community with reasonably intelligent people. You don't see that in many areas of Baltimore. I think Enron said there are only 3 really nice areas of the city and everything else is "meh".
I didn't think I had to elaborate on something so obvious and I wasn't expecting sarcasm but as I told swag yesterday the first person to attack any of my posts here will either be Belgian or Danish.
I didn't think I had to elaborate on something so obvious and I wasn't expecting sarcasm but as I told swag yesterday the first person to attack any of my posts here will either be Belgian or Danish.
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Only place I've been in the states was Lewiston, Maine in 2005-6 to visit family
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Anyways I'm off work...I don't want to get too much into this.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/28/b...-if-thugs-is-right-term-for-protestors-video/
here you go @Fr3sh this is why that culture will continue down the same course they are on.
here you go @Fr3sh this is why that culture will continue down the same course they are on.
I wonder how that identity crisis started, and I also wonder why a positive identity hasn't been put in place for a people that have been on the land for 400 plus years.
The very fact that African American's are told that they are have been "freed" by some bogus politicians with the abolition shows that they have been taught that they can't do shit on their own.....This shit goes REEAAAL deep...
The very fact that African American's are told that they are have been "freed" by some bogus politicians with the abolition shows that they have been taught that they can't do shit on their own.....This shit goes REEAAAL deep...
That's exactly my point.
Like I said the other day without saying what everyone else here sees its almost impossible to not sound racist by some. Literally, impossible. And that's exactly why its hard to shed light on what is happening here without sensitive supporters instantly thinking what many are thinking is racist.
Like I said the other day without saying what everyone else here sees its almost impossible to not sound racist by some. Literally, impossible. And that's exactly why its hard to shed light on what is happening here without sensitive supporters instantly thinking what many are thinking is racist.