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TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

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Glenn's Show Prep

Ed Schultz tries to paint Detroit as a Republican failure

July 23, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Ed Schultz: Thanks to a lot of Republican policies, the city is now filing for bankruptcy. Now, it's the largest public sector bankruptcy in U.S. history, and the consequences could be devastating, if you care about people. The already small force of police, firefighters, and EMTs are in danger of future layoffs. That's only going to make it worse. Roughly 30,000 retired workers are concerned about their pensions, you know, things that they're counting on. Make no mistake: Detroit is going bankrupt is exactly what the Republicans want.

Let me give you the history of Detroit. As Pat said a minute ago, they haven't had a Republican since 1961, but it's really, it's really important to understand 1961. Let me ‑‑ let me start with the situation today and then we're going to go back to 1961. In 1960 Detroit had the highest per capita income in the United States. In 1960 they had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now, what happens when somebody is rich, when somebody is fat and sassy? We know it because we've seen it with our own society in the United States. As a whole, the United States, when it was sitting at the top, that's when we started saying, but you know what? We can screw with this a little bit. You know these principles; we still have some poor. And I hate to quote a crazy person like Jesus, but there will always be the poor among us, always. You are never going to get rid of all of the poor and lift every soul out of poverty. How do I know? Because I've been rich and I've been poor. I will probably be poor again someday in my life. But it doesn't matter, as long as I have the opportunity to try again. And there will always be those people that you can never help. There will always be those people ‑‑ I have friends in my life, and I know you do too. I have friends in my life that they ask for help, but they will never do the things that really will change their lives. You know what it is. And I speak as an alcoholic. I know. There were people, when I was drinking, that would say to me, "Glenn ‑‑" you know the truth, in fact, I'm sitting really close to a friend who said, "It's not that hard. It's not that hard. The truth is really simple. You just have to do a few things." Well, I didn't want that truth and so I wouldn't change my life and so I destroyed myself. But that's okay because that worked out in the end. We have a great opportunity... unless we don't learn from the past.

In 1960 Detroit had the highest per capita income in the United States. Today poorest large city in the United States. Once the fourth largest city in the nation, Detroit's population was shrunk from 1.5 million in 1970 to less than 700,000. Detroit's median household income today is $27,000 compared to the state median income of $48,000. Detroit's poverty level is 36.2%. The rest of the state, 15%. Detroit's unemployment rate is now over 18%. Only 53% of Detroit's residents can be part of the labor force. 45.7% have no job and are not even looking. 35% of Detroit's residents are now on food stamps. The out‑of‑wedlock birthrate in Detroit is more than 75%. 363,281 housing units are in Detroit. 99,000 of them are vacant. The Detroit murder rate is 11 times, 11 times higher than the murder rate in New York City. Detroit currently faces an estimated $14 billion in long‑term debt. Now how, how did a city that was the highest per capita income in the United States in 1960 get here? Well, as I said, Detroit hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1961 and has only had one Republican elected to the Detroit city council since 1970. So there's no way this is a GOP failure. But let's not make this about politics. What happened?

In 1960 they had a Republican mayor. They were riding high, but a new guy came to town. A new democratic mayor. 1961 was the year. He was white, but he understood civil rights, he said. He was a democratic mayor and his name was Jerome Cavanagh. He was elected by promising to give the black population the civil rights they lacked, which is great. We want to make sure everybody has the civil right to be who you are. You know, the reason why Detroit grew so fast is because Detroit didn't care for a long time, compared to the South, didn't care what your color was; could you do the job.

Once he was elected, he did everything in his power to bring the taxpayer‑funded government benefits to the black community. He was the only elected official in the U.S. to serve on President Johnson's Model Cities task force. Now, what was the Model Cities task force? What was that? What was he trying to do to Detroit? Well, he thought that there was a model out there that was great. He thought there was a model out there that could take the most prosperous city in the United States of America and make it even better because there was somebody else who had done this before. When they had revitalized Europe, but not Europe ‑‑ Eastern Europe ‑‑ to rebuild the urban areas in Eastern Europe, they looked to the model of the Soviet Union. At the time the socialists hailed the centralized approach to urban development. They said this is the Soviet innovation. This is it. That's why when you go and you look at New York City and you see things like Co‑op City, it looks like Poland. It looks like Russia. Because it was. They actually in the 1960s looked to the Soviet Union and said they have solved the problem. So he took the most prosperous city in America and said, we need to do the things that they are doing in the Soviet Union, a place that didn't have toilet paper for their citizens! And they implemented the model city system in a nine‑square‑mile section of Detroit.

To finance the project, he pushed a new income tax through and a new commuter tax. He promised the mostly poor and black residents of the model city area that the rich would pay for all of the benefits. He bought their votes with money he was taking from the rich residents. More than $400 million was spent on the model city program. The federal government democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, what businesses they could open, when their businesses had to close. In return the people received cash and they received training and education and healthcare.

This caused the greatest resentment among the population of Detroit that anybody has ever seen in America. It helped trigger the breakdown of civil order and the shrinking of the city's population. In 1967 after the police broke up a celebration at an after‑hours club, one of the neighborhoods began to riot. It ignited the worst race riot of the decade. Black‑owned businesses were looted and burned to the ground. 40 people were killed. 5,000 were left homeless. Democratic administrations after Jerome left engaged in massive giveaways in the form of high salaries, lucrative pensions, health benefit packages that you just couldn't get anywhere else. Public service was no longer service. This was the cream of the crop.

This caused the city's debt to grow quickly and dramatically. Public unions were also allowed to implement inefficient work rules and requirements that raised the cost of doing business in the city. Today more than 80% of the city's $14 billion in debt is due to the pensions and the benefit packages of those government workers. The same Democrat‑fostered union mentality took hold in the private sector as well, to the point where Detroit's auto industry which had formed the city's employment backbone began moving to right‑to‑work states in the South that were far less hostile. Much more affordable. They took a city where everybody ‑‑ I shouldn't say everybody. There will always be poor among us, but it was the most prosperous city in the nation. And they drove business out and they started just racking up the debt. And they made service inside the government much more appealing than actually getting a job someplace else. The private sector's demise reflected the fact that half of Detroit's top 10 employers, half of Detroit's top 10 employers are governmental entities. The city has 11,400 workers, followed by the Detroit public schools at 10,951. So the schoolchildren have less than 11,000 but the city government itself has 11,400. Two healthcare systems and the federal government round up the top five. The big government mentality of teachers unions harmed the Detroit public schools. In 2003 there was a Detroit businessman. He was a philanthropist. His name was Robert Thompson. He offered to give $200 million to a foundation to open 15 new charter high schools in Detroit because he knew things weren't working in 2003 and we had to do something. He withdrew his proposal, said "I can't do it anymore because the teachers unions." They argued that the charter schools would drain millions of dollars from the public schools. And then the excessive regulation in Detroit, multiple inspections and inspection fees, incomprehensible building requirements, expensive mandatory public hearings, arbitrary discretion of the officials, lengthy process delays the entrepreneurs from starting their own businesses. Nobody even wants to start a business venture or improve their existing one. According to one survey in Detroit, 56% of small business owners don't even know if they're operating in compliance with Detroit law. They have no idea. Detroit has the highest big city property taxes in the nation, the highest per capita tax burden in Michigan. Property assessments remain overly inflated, amounting to as much as ten times the market price on the property.

In 2011 Detroit ranked first among the 50 largest U.S. cities in taxes and last among property values. Detroit taxes on a $150,000 house were $4,885, twice the national average. And then you go into corruption. And that's a very long list. This is not, this is not a Republican or conservative failure. This isn't even a democratic failure or idea. This is a progressive/socialist/Communist utopia. And that always fails. Don't let them rewrite history.

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.