Democratic Stronghold of Detroit Under New Management

Half of Michigan Blacks Lose Local Power in Detroit Takeover, as emergency manager Kevyn Orr arrives in near-bankrupt Detroit, almost half of Michigan’s black population will live under the rule of state overseers with little say in the governments nearest them, says an article by Mark Niquette and Chris Christoff on Bloomberg.com which talks more about race and racism than fiscal mismanagement. And little does this article spend on Democratic mis-management from top to bottom being responsible,......oh that's right, it has nothing to do with entitlement focused tax and spend Democrats and everything to do with racism.

In cities run by governors’ appointees after decades of decline, Michiganders whose ancestors fled the segregated South for factory jobs and the right to vote weigh the abstract value of autonomy versus the palpable comfort of a stable community.

Joe Harris, 69, embodies the conflict. His family left Alabama in the 1930s after the Ku Klux Klan threatened an uncle for refusing to let a white man cut in a line. Eight decades later, the longtime government auditor unilaterally ran Benton Harbor, Michigan, where the state installed him after the majority-black city failed to free itself from fiscal distress.

“I understand their frustration with this concept of, ‘Well, you’re taking away our democratic rights,’” Harris said. “But what’s the alternative, especially in Detroit?”

Governor Rick Snyder, a white Republican, yesterday named Orr, an African-American bankruptcy lawyer from Washington, as Detroit’s emergency manager. The city is 82 percent black with a history of racial migration and strife.

The city was an industrial powerhouse with 1.8 million residents in the 1950s. It has withered to about 700,000 people in a sparsely populated 139 square miles (36,000 hectares) as the auto industry contracted and revenue plunged.

Dollars First

While a law taking effect March 28 allows for some input by local elected officials in cities the state has taken over, appointed managers have ultimate authority to operate and restructure them, selling assets and canceling union contracts. Some residents complain that leaves them with no vote in the government closest to them, the one that fills potholes, cleans streets and maintains parks -- or, in some cases, doesn’t.

While Snyder and supporters say fiscal struggles are the reason for Orr’s appointment to run the home of General Motors Co. (GM), some residents fear it is meant to strip the city of its assets and the people of their rights.

Orr will have wide authority, though he must seek alternative money-saving plans from the council and mayor before he sells assets or changes union contracts.

“To some folks in Detroit, it looks like white folks are trying to come in and steal back the city,” said state Representative Fred Durhal, 61, who’s running for mayor this year. “What I tell them is what’s going on has more to do with another color, and that’s green.”

Great Migration

The cities under emergency management, Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Allen Park, Benton Harbor and Ecorse, account for 49.5 percent of the state’s black population, according to U.S. Census data. They contain only 2.1 percent of the white population.

About 6 million blacks moved from the South to Michigan and other northern states during the Great Migration, which began during World War I and ended in the 1970s, said Isabel Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” a book about the era. Detroit’s black population increased from 5,740 in 1910 to 120,000 by 1930, or about 9 percent of the population, and nearly 30 percent was black by the early 1960s, according to “The Detroit Almanac.”

Forbidden Games

They were fleeing a system known as Jim Crow, which controlled every aspect of black southerners’ lives, including matters as picayune as forbidding whites to play checkers with blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, Wilkerson said. Industries seeking cheap workers recruited the first migrants, and succeeding generations followed to work in the auto industry and other factories, she said.

“The parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of many African-Americans now in Detroit and the rest of the state left to find freedom to pursue their dreams,” Wilkerson said by e- mail from Atlanta. “It would not be surprising if the descendants of the Great Migration would be desirous of help but wary of and sensitive to efforts to control their destiny,” she said.

In Benton Harbor, home of Whirlpool Corp. (WHR), factories sent buses south after World War II to bring workers, said Robert Myers, curator of the Berrien County Historical Association.

From 2010 until Tony Saunders II took over Feb. 1, Harris ran the city of 10,000 where almost 90 percent of the residents are black, according to U.S. Census data. The city lost almost half its population since 1960, 48 percent of the citizens live in poverty, and the median household income is $17,815 compared with $48,669 statewide.

After three years of emergency management, Benton Harbor’s debate about race and the law hasn’t been settled.

Racist Miasma

Marcus Muhammad, a city commissioner since 2010, said the law establishing emergency managers has been “a dismal failure.”

“The evidence is overwhelming that this is a racist law, and that it cannot escape the racial overtones that are leaking out of it like alcohol leaks out of pores,” said Muhammad, 38.

Wilce Cooke, Benton Harbor’s former mayor, said his mother came to the city from Arkansas to join relatives who moved for foundry jobs. He calls the emergency-manager law “subtle Jim Crow.”

James Hightower, who succeeded him in 2011, said elected officials failed to make decisions needed for fiscal stability.

“Poor management is not black, it’s not white, it’s not red or yellow,” Hightower said in an interview. “It’s just poor management.”

The emergency manager’s appointment is “non-political and purely financial,” Jeff Noel, a spokesman for Whirlpool, said in a statement. “The process is painful, and invites debate, but the process also creates positive change.”

Surrendered Phones

Standing on her porch in Benton Harbor, Evelyn Wilburn, 41, said that while she doesn’t like losing voting power, she wants good services and doesn’t think city workers needed the mobile phones and gas cards they gave up.

“If it’s best for the city, that’s OK,” Wilburn said.

Michigan, like most states, has broad authority over local governments, even the power to abolish them, said John Mogk, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who specializes in urban policy.

While that basic organizational power is different from the intricate legal codes of segregation, the emergency-manager measure links blacks with failure, said David Pilgrim, founding curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and a sociology professor at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

Ruled and Rulers

“If I’m a young, African-American person growing up in Detroit or Benton Harbor or one of these mostly black areas, what is the message that sends?” Pilgrim said. “It certainly looks like the message is that people that look like you can’t govern.”

In downtown Detroit on March 7, Charles Williams II, a reverend, and about 50 supporters protested the emergency- manager law. He used a bullhorn to promise a struggle in the spirit of civil-rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, assassinated in Mississippi in 1963.

“I don’t see how it couldn’t be racially motivated,” Williams, 30, said of the law. “We will stop this because of folks who stood before us, like Medgar Evers, who fought for voting rights.”

News in the Second Amendment Fight

Colorado sheriff refuses to enforce gun-control bills

A Colorado sheriff says he won't enforce two aggressive gun-control measures waiting to be signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke told The Greeley Tribune that Democratic lawmakers are scrambling after recent mass shootings, and the bills are "feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable."

One bill expands background checks on firearm purchases, and the other limits ammunition magazines to 15 rounds. The 15-round magazine limit would make Colorado the first state outside the East Coast to ratchet back gun rights after last year's shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn.

Colorado's gun-control debates have been closely watched because of the state's gun-loving frontier heritage and painful history of mass shootings, most recently last summer's movie theater shooting that killed 12.

The sheriff said he "won't bother enforcing" the laws because it would be impossible for officers to keep track of how the requirements are being met by gun owners — and he and other sheriffs are considering suing the state to block the measures if they are signed into law.

Cooke said the bill passed Friday requiring a $10 background check to legally transfer a gun wouldn't keep firearms out of the hands of those who use them for violence.

"Criminals are still going to get their guns," he said.

The sheriff's office did not immediately return calls left by The Associated Press.

The magazine-limit bill passed earlier in the week will technically ban all magazines because of a provision that outlaws any magazine that can be altered, he said, adding that all magazines can be altered to a higher capacity.

Expanded checks have been a top priority for Hickenlooper, who called for the proposal during his State of the State address in January.

Cooke oversees law enforcement in Colorado's third-largest county by area. His jurisdiction includes its largest city, Greeley, and large swaths of farmland and areas of oil and gas production.

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Kansas House OKs three gun laws

The Kansas House has approved three proposals to alter the state's gun regulations, including expanding the locations where concealed weapons could be carried.

Kansas State Capitol, State House, Captial Dome Topeka More NewsRead more Breaking NewsThe bills passed with broad support Thursday and head to the Senate for consideration.

One measure would let school districts and state colleges designate employees who could carry concealed firearms inside their buildings, even if such weapons were banned for others.

The bill also would expand the number of public buildings where people with a state permit could bring concealed weapons, including the Statehouse.

Another measure declares that the federal government cannot regulate firearms manufactured, sold and kept in Kansas.

The proposals are a reaction to discussions about new federal gun-control measures after December's school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

Benghazi Survivors Told to Keep Quiet

Highlighted on Fox News in an interview with Senator Graham (R-SC) and in the below article from the Blaze, a highly distressing and disgusting practice of the Obama Administration of saying one thing and all together doing another. In most languages this is called lying.  Now we can add conspiracy and cover up. 

The Obama administration has told the injured survivors of the Benghazi terror attack “to be quiet,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alleges in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

While Congress presses for more information surrounding the infamous Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack, Graham says the survivors feel as if they can’t reach out and tell their stories. Critics of the White House’s handling of Benghazi say survivors have been completely inaccessible to Congress and the media.

When asked about Benghazi survivors, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters, “I’m sure that the White House is not preventing anyone from speaking.”

Graham told Fox News he isn’t buying it. He said, “the bottom line is they feel that they can’t come forth, they’ve been told to be quiet.”

“We cannot let this administration or any other administration get away with hiding from the American people and Congress, people who were there in real time to tell the story,” the senator from South Carolina added.

More from Fox News:

Graham continued to voice concern about the inaccurate or incomplete accounts that came from the Obama administration in the days following the attack. He is among a handful of Republican lawmakers pressing for access to and more information about the survivors.

A congressional source tells Fox News that Hill staffers investigating the attack believe about 37 personnel were in Benghazi on behalf of the State Department and CIA on Sept. 11. With the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, about 33 people were evacuated. Of them, a State Department official confirmed there were three diplomatic security agents and one contractor who were injured in the assault – one seriously.

A diplomatic security source told Fox News the State Department diplomatic security agent who was in the most serious condition suffered a severe head injury during the second wave of the attack at the annex.

This agent was described as the likely State Department employee visited at Walter Reed Medical Center by Secretary of State John Kerry in January.

An official with the State Department did not deny the account of the diplomatic security source and did not comment on the agent’s injuries or whether the agent was visited by Kerry or Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.

Other GOP congressman, like Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), argue the Obama White House has offered “zero” documents on the survivors, much less provided names of the people attacked in Libya.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) on Friday said the Obama administration is “covering up something” in regards to the Benghazi attack, which left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department employee Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.