Citing the significant disruption to the teaching and learning process Lapeer Superintendent Matt Wandrie stated that his district will be starting their Christmas break early due to rumors and concerns of violence within Detroit. In the wake of the tragic events in Connecticut, school officials of several Detroit Districts have decided to cancel school rather than risk any incidents. Other area schools are indicating a stepped up police presence.

While these may be prudent decisions on the part of the schools one might question the missed opportunity to quell rumors and Middle-Ages type hysteria rather than accept and embrace it.

Of course, I may be wrong.

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Once a thriving metropolitan city Detroit saw its heyday begin with the automotive industry in the 1920′s. But changes led to economic downfall that depressed the city, causing much of the population to leave, while its infrastructure remains, crumbling. Built to house two Million residents there are now just one-third the population. A discouraging seven percent of eighth grade students can read at grade level according to US Daily Review while twenty percent of students are illiterate.  Homes are for sale at just $1000. The city holds the dubious position of most dangerous city by Forbes.  City managers are talking about bulldozing entire neighborhoods now vacant because they can’t afford to keep them secure.

The Blaze also chose to look at Detroit this week. They saw a different side of the city than what President Obama imagined. You can see the sad pictures of a once thriving area now completely dilapidated and destroyed. The Blaze.

The changes are being documented byDetroiturbex.com. Visit their website and scroll through the slide show on the “Why” page.

This surely is not the future as envisioned by Obama. But if he is using the same ideas what’s to stop it from happening?

The advertisement assures “recipients” that the “sign up process is easy and will only take a few minutes to complete”.

Just as the Obamaphone Lady made it clear, if you “are on food stamps, SSI, Medicaid or Section 8 you are welcome to receive a free cell phone”… well, that is, (while supplies last).”

Frosty Wooldridge (born 1947) is a US journalist, writer, environmentalist, traveler

DETROIT: By Frosty Wooldridge

For 15 years, from the mid 1970′s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan. I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses and school yards. Trash everywhere!

Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it, and ignored it. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps!

With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10, and in one case,one woman birthed 24 children as reported by the Detroit Free Press, all on American taxpayer dollars.

A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ flourish in Detroit. If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.

Mayor Coleman Young, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in America, outside of Richard Daley in Chicago, rode Detroit down to its knees… He set the benchmark for cronyism, incompetence, and arrogance. As a black man, he said, “I am the MFIC.” The IC meant “in charge”.

You can figure out the rest Detroit became a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.

As a United Van Lines truck driver for my summer job from teaching math and science, I loaded hundreds of American families into my van for a new life in another city or state.

Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city for the free government handouts, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan, but most work in Detroit. As the whites moved out, the Muslims moved in.

As the crimes became more violent, the whites fled. Finally, unlawful Mexicans moved in at a torrid pace. Detroit suffers so much shoplifting that grocery stores no longer operate in many inner city locations. You could cut the racial tension in the air with a knife! Detroit may be one of our best examples of multiculturalism: pure dislike, and total separation from America…

Today, you hear Muslim calls to worship over the city like a new American Baghdad with hundreds of Islamic mosques in Michigan , paid for by Saudi Arabia oil money. High school flunk out rates reached 76 percent last June, according to NBC’s Brian Williams. Classrooms resemble more foreign countries than America… English? Few speak it! The city features a 50 percent illiteracy rate and growing.

Unemployment hit 28.9 percent in 2009 as the auto industry vacated the city. In Time Magazine’s October 4, 2009, “The Tragedy of Detroit: How a great city fell, and how it can rise again,” I choked on the writer’s description of what happened. “If Detroit had been ravaged by a hurricane, and submerged by a ravenous flood, we’d know a lot more about it,” said Daniel Okrent. “If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we’d see it on the evening news every night.” Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it, if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice.

But Detroit, once our fourth largest city, now 11th and slipping rapidly, has had no such luck. Its disaster has long been a slow unwinding that seemed to remove it from the rest of the country.

Even the death rattle that in the past year emanated from its signature industry brought more attention to the auto executives than to the people of the city, who had for so long been victimized by their dreadful decision making.”

As Coleman Young’s corruption brought the city to its knees, no amount of federal dollars could save the incredible payoffs, kickbacks and illegality permeating his administration. I witnessed the city’s death from the seat of my 18-wheeler tractor trailer because I moved people out of every sector of decaying Detroit.

“By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit ‘s treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services,” Okrent said. “The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers’ union to reject a philanthropist’s offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit today, the unemployment rate is 28.9%. That’s worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.

At the end of Okrent’s report, and he will write a dozen more about Detroit, he said, “That’s because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city’s collapse, it’s also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century.

If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can’t find a way to get up, what does that say about America s future?”

As you read in my book review of Chris Steiner’s book,”$20 Per Gallon”, the auto industry won’t come back. Immigration will keep pouring more and more uneducated third world immigrants from the Middle East into Detroit, thus creating a beachhead for Islamic hegemony in America. If 50 percent illiteracy continues, we will see more homegrown terrorists spawned out of the Muslim ghettos of Detroit. Illiteracy plus Islam equals walking human bombs.

You have already seen it in Madrid, Spain, London, England, and Paris, France with train bombings, subway bombings and riots. As their numbers grow, so will their power to enact their barbaric Sharia Law that negates republican forms of government, first amendment rights, and subjugates women to the lowest rungs on the human ladder. We will see more honor killings by upset husbands, fathers and brothers that demand subjugation by their daughters, sisters and wives. Muslims prefer be-headings of women to scare the hell out of any other members of their sect from straying. Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country and way of life.

This was once a great city, Henry Ford must be turning over in his grave, Liberal views and policies have brought this city down. Of course Liberals will deny it, but it is a fact, something that Liberals like to ignore. If we sit and do nothing, the rest of the country is sure to follow.

This Is One Man’s Opinion.

Much ado has been made about the Super Bowl Clint Eastwood/Chrysler commercial, expressing the theme that Detroit, and America at large, is making a comeback. In some conservative circles, “Dirty Harry” has been criticized as shilling for President Obama.

But after reading this article by Mara Gay of The Daily, I’m convinced that the tough-guy libertarian may be the ideal spokesman for Motor City. Facing huge cutbacks in the city police force, abysmally poor response times to calls for service, and a general lack of police effectiveness, the residents of Detroit- which purportedly has the nation’s second-highest per capita murder rate- are arming themselves in record numbers- and self-defense shootings are up 79% year-over-year, and 2200% above the national average.

The article, while clearly left-biased (it describes armed citizens as “vigilantes”), illustrates a major shift in public thinking in Detroit: People are realizing they must provide for their own protection. The city police department, with its long history of mismanagement, is even more of a failure today than it ever has been. Even as the department faces multi-million-dollar budget shortfalls, the city paid over $6 million for a former casino building (VIDEO) to convert into a new police headquarters; and DPD is rolling out a “virtual precinct” program which directs calls for crimes reported after-the-fact during evening and overnight hours to an officer at headquarters to take a report. Translation: If you come home after work to find your house has been burglarized, DPD will take a report and get around to investigating it sometime. It’s no wonder foreclosed houses are selling (or not) for as little as $50 in Detroit.

Those who can afford to move out of Detroit have already done so, and those who can’t are at the end of their rope. Big-government, predominantly-Democrat Detroiters are now fully realizing that their city government can’t even provide essential services, and so they are forced to become self-sufficient.

Stated another way: Residents of one of the most liberal cities in the nation are getting the harshest “wake-up call” one can receive on the failings of big-government liberalism as a theory of governance: The promise of greater safety, which is the most-effective and most-often used means of convincing the public to give up their money and their liberties, is now a broken promise in Detroit. The usual socialist responses to such a crisis are unavailable: Raising taxes isn’t an option, because there’s nothing left to tax; begging for money from the state government isn’t an option, because the state is broke; harsher gun control laws would be opposed, because people across the political spectrum are buying and carrying guns; and more stringent enforcement isn’t a possibility, because Wayne County Jail has no room to house convicts.

As Detroiters begin to cope with the “new normal” of self-reliance, they’ll also ask questions about the condition of the city’s police force. They’ll want to know how it could get to be so bad. The answers to these questions- corrupt Democrat politicians, incompetent management, greedy and self-serving public sector unions, short-sighted liberal policies, overspending and overtaxing- can’t be concealed behind socialist rhetoric any longer. The city government has run out of excuses and other people’s money, and there’s no room in the budget to hire Robocop.

Big changes in self-defense thinking are nothing new for Detroit: The Sweet Trials of 1925-1926, which took place in Detroit, were the first occasion in our nation’s history in which an African-American successfully claimed self-defense in court.

Maybe the star of Gran Torino is a good spokesman for Detroit after all.

Fast forward to the year 2012, and we see the city of Detroit facing Greece-style austerity measures due to a $200-$300-$400 million dollar hole in it’s operating budget. (Depending on who’s numbers you believe)  Government services have been slashed, workers laid off and now we see that Detroit May Close Half of it’s Schools. “According to the Detroit News, Detroit Public Schools considered filing for bankruptcy in 2009 but declined.  In the past year alone, debt in the district has increased by more than $100 million, brought on by a ‘mix of revenue declines in property taxes, reduced state aid, declining enrollment and an unplanned staffing surge’ this past fall.” That was almost exactly a year ago, and apparently the Detroit Labor Unions are still bankrupting the Motor City today.   Add to that past crop of debt-caused austerity measures, the current reports that the State of Michigan will be forced to appoint another  “emergency manager with broad powers to cut spending” if city employee unions and the bureaucrats do not reach a deal on major concessions proving that Detroit’s debt problems can no longer be ignored.  How can a school system that is millions of dollars in debt, while facing declining enrollment and revenues, justify the above-mentioned “unplanned staffing surge”?  UNIONS.

Mike Shedlock sums  up the situation as follows, regarding the supposed deals to save Detroit announced by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing:

Deal Reached?
Mayor Bing is taking his script straight from Greece where a deal has been “close” for days, weeks, and now months.

What’s Best for Detroit?
The best thing for Detroit would be if there is no deal, or the state rejects the deal.
Unions are the problem and the solution is to get rid of them entirely. That will not happen under Bing, but it could happen in a state takeover.
Bing is not interested in what’s best for Detroit taxpayers nor is he interested is what’s best for Detroit school children where shockingly only 25% graduate high schools. Rather, Bing is out to save as much of the status quo as he can, including his own job of course.

Collective Bargaining has Morally and Fiscally Bankrupted Detroit Schools.

In the ultimate example of Mayor Bing proving to be nothing more than a big spending and tax increase [Democrat] denier of reality, last week Bing began firing 1000 of the city’s 11,300 public employees, has proposed a 10% cut in payments to vendors, and wants to double the 1% tax on corporations.  He proposes all of this while largely remaining silent about the real culprit that is driving the Motor City off of the debt cliff: Public Unions lavish salaries, pensions and benefits packages.

NOTE:  The Detroit Public School System is controlled by a Big Labor Union, resulting in over half of Detroit’s adults being deemed illiterate.

Update: Detroit makes top 10 list of America’s most miserable cities. (again)

Many people want to blame the teachers union for the high illiteracy rate in Detroit. Are the teachers so underpaid that they just do not feel it is their duty to make sure their students get a decent education? Apparently, this isn’t the case as we see by fact that the Detroit Federation of Teachers has the city dumping $15,945 dollars a year on every student today as opposed to $10,259 dollars per student just three years ago. DFT President Keith Johnson says it is not the job of the teacher’s union to make sure every Detroit student can read, and points to the lack of attendance standards as the root cause of the illiteracy problem in Detroit today. Mr. Johnson has a valid point there, as the average student in Detroit schools missed 46 days during the 2008-2009 school year! It is kind of hard to teach students anything when they are not attending classes.

According to Detroit’s school attendance policy, students are required to attend 92% of classes and not miss more than 14 school days per year. The problem is that there are no real consequences for school children, or parents, that do not make their children attend school. Here is a simple solution to help Detroit improve school attendance. If a child is missing too many school days, report it to the welfare office. Then make it mandatory that the parent(s) come in for a review and explain to them that no school will mean no welfare check the following month. This will also prove to the taxpayers and businesses paying for the welfare and education these children that the city of Detroit means business in cleaning up it’s dysfunctional illiteracy and school attendance problem. Let the parents find no welfare check in the mailbox a few times and watch how school attendance improves dramatically. Then, when  student attendance improves, Detroit’s well-paid teachers will not be able to use poor attendance as an excuse, and the City could then weed out the bad teachers, fire them, and keep the best teachers available. That would be a win-win situation for the children of Detroit and the taxpayers alike. My only question for the Mayor and School Superintendents of Detroit, is whether or not anyone has the courage to take the measures necessary to improve literacy in Detroit, or will they continue to let it sink to the levels of a dysfunctional, illiterate, third world ghetto ?

When I was raised in Michigan, being raised in the ghetto, or other dysfunctional welfare neighborhoods and subsidized housing projects, was something to be ashamed of, not something to be proud of. This is not the case in Detroit today, with rap groups and gangs names containing the word ghetto like it is something to be proud of. The taxpayers, loyal businesses, and good citizens that have had the courage to stay in Detroit should demand stiff reforms in education attendance and welfare reform. Until then, they are as big a part of the problem as the very politicians that are dragging this once great city down.

The plane was reportedly being held in a remote location and passengers were interviewed. NBC is reporting that according to a senior government official, a note found in Delta flight’s lavatory caused the flight crew to decide to divert.

At 4pm this afternoon, the plane was released with no security issues having been discovered.

last update: 4:05pm