Water shutoff in Detriot.

[marshallnoise]

Sooo... how many of the racist laws you cite did Detroit implement?

The ones requiring people to pay for the service of water delivery. Its a racist institution!

[The Dark Side of Will]

So your solution is 600,000 people should walk to the nearest lake and shit in it and bring buckets back to their apartments so they can shower and cook?

Works for the Ganges... ummm... well...

It's not 600,000 people who are out of water. OP's original article says 1500-3000/week with 80,000 in arrears.

The woman they quote when saying hundreds of thousands obviously can't count or perform 4 digit arithmetic.

The assertion that those whose water service had been turned off were mostly black is a red herring, as urban Detroit's population is 82% black ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit#Race_and_ethnicity )

[The Dark Side of Will]

You are a special kind of stupid, aren't you?

Not helpful. :?

[smooth]

Works for the Ganges... ummm... well...

It's not 600,000 people who are out of water. OP's original article says 1500-3000/week with 80,000 in arrears.

The woman they quote when saying hundreds of thousands obviously can't count or perform 4 digit arithmetic.

So if we take what mrsleeve wrote at face value, that rates will go up as revenue dwindles, as more and more people can't pay their bills and have their water shut off the municipal water source will become increasingly insolvent resulting in even higher rates and even less people able to pay until the bankrupt city loses it's ability to serve the entire community.

But ignore that for a minute...it's not as if 80,000 people can go shit in the lake and bring potable water back home in buckets, either right? Your response sounds like we might be missing the forest for the trees.


In any case, you seemed to have misunderstood what my post #28 was responding to. You made the claim that inequality had nothing to do with the situation in Detroit so I explained how someone making that argument would link the current problems to historical inequality and racism.

Detroit as it currently exists didn't come about in a vacuum. The things I outlined explain why we have doughnuts of inequality all through the US. Why we have some of the wealthiest communities like Irvine and other areas of south Orange County right next to some of the worst parts of the us like Santa Ana. Why we have places like Stanford and Silicon Valley right next to some of the worst crime ridden places like east Palo Alto.

These high concentrations of crime, violence, and poverty didn't happen by accident. There's a direct link to the policies our country allowed legally that transformed into more soft versions like redlining and deed restrictions and then eventually illegal forms of discrimination that leave certain communities worse off than communities right next to them.

The reason Detroit is experiencing these issues related to inequality isn't as simple as saying blacks there are lazy and dumb. The thing you cited, how politics there got so fucked up and corrupt, has a direct relationship to decades of policies of restricting peoples right to vote and build capital and pass it to the next generation. You can't make that claim that inequality has nothing to do with what's going on and square that with US history.

And as for whether these policies are being implemented in a racist fashion or not, that's for each person to decide based on certain facts like inner city black residents having their water shut off for owing a few hundred or thousand dollars and meanwhile nearby golf courses have all the water they want to waste to water their courses while they owe millions of dollars to the city. Very hard to square why some residents are losing their drinking water while wealthy, white serving country clubs and amenities aren't having their water shut off even bough they owe more money.

Isn't 82% percent black "mostly" black? How is that a red herring?

[marshallnoise]

Not helpful. :?

Engaging him is not helpful either. He has A.D.D. something fierce and can't rub two thoughts together to save his life. He is purposefully obtuse too. What are you thinking you'll get out of him?

[marshallnoise]

So if we take what mrsleeve wrote at face value, that rates will go up as revenue dwindles, as more and more people can't pay their bills and have their water shut off the municipal water source will become increasingly insolvent resulting in even higher rates and even less people able to pay until the bankrupt city loses it's ability to serve the entire community.

But ignore that for a minute...it's not as if 80,000 people can go shit in the lake and bring potable water back home in buckets, either right? Your response sounds like we might be missing the forest for the trees.


In any case, you seemed to have misunderstood what my post #28 was responding to. You made the claim that inequality had nothing to do with the situation in Detroit so I explained how someone making that argument would link the current problems to historical inequality and racism.

Detroit as it currently exists didn't come about in a vacuum. The things I outlined explain why we have doughnuts of inequality all through the US. Why we have some of the wealthiest communities like Irvine and other areas of south Orange County right next to some of the worst parts of the us like Santa Ana. Why we have places like Stanford and Silicon Valley right next to some of the worst crime ridden places like east Palo Alto.

These high concentrations of crime, violence, and poverty didn't happen by accident. There's a direct link to the policies our country allowed legally that transformed into more soft versions like redlining and deed restrictions and then eventually illegal forms of discrimination that leave certain communities worse off than communities right next to them.

The reason Detroit is experiencing these issues related to inequality isn't as simple as saying blacks there are lazy and dumb. The thing you cited, how politics there got so fucked up and corrupt, has a direct relationship to decades of policies of restricting peoples right to vote and build capital and pass it to the next generation. You can't make that claim that inequality has nothing to do with what's going on and square that with US history.

And as for whether these policies are being implemented in a racist fashion or not, that's for each person to decide based on certain facts like inner city black residents having their water shut off for owing a few hundred or thousand dollars and meanwhile nearby golf courses have all the water they want to waste to water their courses while they owe millions of dollars to the city. Very hard to square why some residents are losing their drinking water while wealthy, white serving country clubs and amenities aren't having their water shut off even bough they owe more money.

Isn't 82% percent black "mostly" black? How is that a red herring?

You are certifiably out of your gourd. How you can draw those conclusions is beyond me. There is no logic in them, just pure sophistry.

You have to be a bot. There is no other explanation.

[Farbin Kaiber]

You are certifiably out of your gourd. How you can draw those conclusions is beyond me. There is no logic in them, just pure sophistry.

You have to be a bot. There is no other explanation.

The scary part is he is paid to educate young adults in our country, and people wonder why things are speeding up to the end result of falling apart.

Farbin said some of the customers had more than a year of notice (and I'm also curious about where he saw that).

And, I'm pretty sure I was not the one that said a year behind on payments for transmission of a basic human right.

http://www.r3vlimited.com/board/showpost.php?p=4165942&postcount=32

[mrsleeve]

So now fruit Smoothie thinks he knows more about detroit, montana, And what I did for a living for a solid decade (sometimes in detroit metro area ) than me. His intellectualism knows no bounds it seems

[smooth]

Lol. If you want your references to be clear, link them or just state the post number like you did when pressed. A mention of "post about racist policies" could mean a lot of things, as you and I both post in mutiple threads here.

Sooo... how many of the racist laws you cite did Detroit implement?

Sorry, I was driving across country when this thread first started and was posting from my phone. Then using my iPad to respond to you. I did state post 28 the first time you asked, you didn't have to press me, and then clarified when you asked a second time that it was post #28 in this thread.

It's hard to cite and link from an iPad and given the bulk of the responses from a number of people here not really worth the time and effort.

But I'll lay out in more clear detail what I was referring to so you can assess the linkages that people try and draw when exploring why we have certain problems in some areas and not necessarily in others.


We can start when slavery was legal.
During that time blacks were legally precluded from owning property, voting, learning to read and write, and having families.

Those concepts and rights, I hope you agree without too much arguing, are pretty much the bedrock of what every individual needs at a basic, rudimentary level of existence to pass wealth from one generation to the next.

When blacks were "freed" they were still precluded from doing all of those things except the ability to have families and there was some limited homesteading allowed. But they still weren't allowed to freely engage in buying/selling property and they couldn't vote and weren't allowed to learn to read and write (so you can hopefully understand and agree how it'd be difficult to change the policies that hindered them from making their situation better).

In fact, many remained in the south and continued working on the plantations they had been "freed" from but they had to pay rent and food to their previous masters. For many, this became indentured servitude that placed them in more debt than they would have been in had they remained slaves.

Some actually travelled out of the south and some went to places like Detroit. in Detroit they had more rights than they had before but not the right to vote or hold property or sell it. That didn't come until decades later...

In the meantime, we had a series of things that really screwed over the entire population. Mainly we had the Depression. Coming out of the depression we instituted a set of policies to give people a leg up...a social safety net. What many people don't usually know about, at least when I teach this topic in classes my students aren't aware but who knows about the people in this thread, is that those social safety net policies explicitly excluded blacks.

They didn't say things like: blacks can't have social security, but they came in the form of "domestic workers and people who work in agriculture" aren't eligible. The very economic sectors that blacks had filled in for our economy when they came off the plantations. As I'm writing this, you'll probably notice some dove tailing between black impoverishment and rural white poor and those similarities are indeed important...

the urban blacks who had migrated to places like detroit weren't faring much better because for a long time they weren't able to join unions. and when they finally were able to join unions they got the shittiest jobs. and the jobs they got in the factories were the lowest paying and most dangerous. so they had a range of health issues, lower pay, and not much opportunity to climb the economic ladder...even though they may have been hard working citizens just like the white guys they were working near.

there's an interesting kind of fiction about white progress: that whites had no help from the government and blacks have had every chance afforded them. if we think to policies like the GI bill and guaranteed housing/education loans (and social security and unemployment insurance) we can see how whites did in fact receive a lot of government assistance. in fact, those were the policies that built up much of what became our nation's middle class.

but if you consider that blacks couldn't go to schools until brown v. board (and this isn't ancient history, we're talking the 50's here) and they still couldn't own property or sell it (fair housing act wasn't until 1968)...racist policies limiting what blacks could own and sell, where they could live, and where they could go to school didn't become illegal until about 50 years ago. This isn't the hundreds of years ago that people like to cite when they ask what the big deal is nowadays.

Those kinds of policies limited the house that someone returning from war could buy and own. Even though blacks may have had guaranteed loans from their GI Bills they were only allowed to buy property in places like compton. Meanwhile, marshallnoise's parents got to buy their home in beautiful oceanside. when it came time to pass that property to marshallnoise, their house was worth $500,000 dollars whereas Joe Black's home in compton was worth $80,000. And when marshallnoise wanted to become an accountant he got to choose wherever he wanted to go depending on how well he did in k-12 and his parents could put their home up for collateral and get a nice juicy loan. Joe Black's kids didn't have those options. They simply didn't exist. And when they finally became options, their capital was much less so Joe Black wasn't able to pass as much wealth to his son or daughter.

Now, schools are funded primarily from local tax dollars. As are policing, libraries, and parks, etc. So when Joe Black's home value nosedived so did the tax revenue. The community Joe Black lived in became less safe and less secure. And the schools weren't able to teach the kids particularly well. As we moved into the 20th century, where books gave way to iPads and computers, Joe Black's kids went to school where they were lucky to get a desk to sit in much less a modern computer to learn on.

Meanwhile, Joe White's kids in Irvine got to go to the best schools in the country where they had one teacher for 30 students (instead of 300 students). They all had their own computers and they got a laptop to take home and do their homework on. Any wonder who is going to get the better grades and excel scholastically?

So now all these problems that have built up over time and finally coalescing into what mrsleeve described as "a bombed out Mogadishu." We have urban areas with highly concentrated levels of crime, violence, and poverty. Generations of people who have been precluded from building up capital that they could pass to their children. Larger global changes that have restructured what one can and can't do for a living. Manufacturing has largely left the building...and those are the jobs that people could fill when they couldn't get into or didn't want to get into school. Those are the kinds of things that kept little shitheads out of prison.

You remember those days? You could be a little shit and your dad would introduce you to uncle Erm and put your ass to work in the factory. Didn't matter if you had a high school diploma. You could even buy a home and raise a family on a workman's wage. You could be a little shit until 15-16 years old and then get your ass into a decent paying job and work your butt off until you died. Those opportunities are long gone.

So now little shits turn into big shits. they go off to prison and *their* little shits turn into even more dangerous shits. and the whole thing spirals downward until we get "bombed out Mogadishu's" that the rest of us have to deal with. And today, we're going to deal with this in the form of thousands of people losing their ability to pay for something as basic as running water...in the USA, what's portrayed as the richest country in the world. It seems insane that people would defend that process. But instead when I try and outline how we have some answering to do for what has happened in the past, I get a constant stream of personal insults. As far as I know I was able to make this post without any personal insults...interesting how that works ;)

[smooth]

So now fruit Smoothie thinks he knows more about detroit, montana, And what I did for a living for a solid decade (sometimes in detroit metro area ) than me. His intellectualism knows no bounds it seems

what are you talking about? do you feel the need to be on the opposite side of anything I write so badly that you disagree with me even when I agree with what you wrote?

[smooth]

The scary part is he is paid to educate young adults in our country, and people wonder why things are speeding up to the end result of falling apart.

I educate cops, correctional officers, and district attorneys. Criminal Justice is hardly a liberal bastion. But, what was it someone said, "keep fucking that chicken"

[ParsedOut]

I educate cops, correctional officers, and district attorneys. Criminal Justice is hardly a liberal bastion. But, what was it someone said, "keep fucking that chicken"

Ahh shit, he teaches people who carry guns and have authority...we're really screwed.

[Farbin Kaiber]

Sorry, I was driving across country when this thread first started and was posting from my phone. Then using my iPad to respond to you. I did state post 28 the first time you asked, you didn't have to press me, and then clarified when you asked a second time that it was post #28 in this thread.

It's hard to cite and link from an iPad and given the bulk of the responses from a number of people here not really worth the time and effort.

But I'll lay out in more clear detail what I was referring to so you can assess the linkages that people try and draw when exploring why we have certain problems in some areas and not necessarily in others.


We can start when slavery was legal.
During that time blacks were legally precluded from owning property, voting, learning to read and write, and having families.

Those concepts and rights, I hope you agree without too much arguing, are pretty much the bedrock of what every individual needs at a basic, rudimentary level of existence to pass wealth from one generation to the next.

When blacks were "freed" they were still precluded from doing all of those things except the ability to have families and there was some limited homesteading allowed. But they still weren't allowed to freely engage in buying/selling property and they couldn't vote and weren't allowed to learn to read and write (so you can hopefully understand and agree how it'd be difficult to change the policies that hindered them from making their situation better).

In fact, many remained in the south and continued working on the plantations they had been "freed" from but they had to pay rent and food to their previous masters. For many, this became indentured servitude that placed them in more debt than they would have been in had they remained slaves.

Some actually travelled out of the south and some went to places like Detroit. in Detroit they had more rights than they had before but not the right to vote or hold property or sell it. That didn't come until decades later...

In the meantime, we had a series of things that really screwed over the entire population. Mainly we had the Depression. Coming out of the depression we instituted a set of policies to give people a leg up...a social safety net. What many people don't usually know about, at least when I teach this topic in classes my students aren't aware but who knows about the people in this thread, is that those social safety net policies explicitly excluded blacks.

They didn't say things like: blacks can't have social security, but they came in the form of "domestic workers and people who work in agriculture" aren't eligible. The very economic sectors that blacks had filled in for our economy when they came off the plantations. As I'm writing this, you'll probably notice some dove tailing between black impoverishment and rural white poor and those similarities are indeed important...

the urban blacks who had migrated to places like detroit weren't faring much better because for a long time they weren't able to join unions. and when they finally were able to join unions they got the shittiest jobs. and the jobs they got in the factories were the lowest paying and most dangerous. so they had a range of health issues, lower pay, and not much opportunity to climb the economic ladder...even though they may have been hard working citizens just like the white guys they were working near.

there's an interesting kind of fiction about white progress: that whites had no help from the government and blacks have had every chance afforded them. if we think to policies like the GI bill and guaranteed housing/education loans (and social security and unemployment insurance) we can see how whites did in fact receive a lot of government assistance. in fact, those were the policies that built up much of what became our nation's middle class.

but if you consider that blacks couldn't go to schools until brown v. board (and this isn't ancient history, we're talking the 50's here) and they still couldn't own property or sell it (fair housing act wasn't until 1968)...racist policies limiting what blacks could own and sell, where they could live, and where they could go to school didn't become illegal until about 50 years ago. This isn't the hundreds of years ago that people like to cite when they ask what the big deal is nowadays.

Those kinds of policies limited the house that someone returning from war could buy and own. Even though blacks may have had guaranteed loans from their GI Bills they were only allowed to buy property in places like compton. Meanwhile, marshallnoise's parents got to buy their home in beautiful oceanside. when it came time to pass that property to marshallnoise, their house was worth $500,000 dollars whereas Joe Black's home in compton was worth $80,000. And when marshallnoise wanted to become an accountant he got to choose wherever he wanted to go depending on how well he did in k-12 and his parents could put their home up for collateral and get a nice juicy loan. Joe Black's kids didn't have those options. They simply didn't exist. And when they finally became options, their capital was much less so Joe Black wasn't able to pass as much wealth to his son or daughter.

Now, schools are funded primarily from local tax dollars. As are policing, libraries, and parks, etc. So when Joe Black's home value nosedived so did the tax revenue. The community Joe Black lived in became less safe and less secure. And the schools weren't able to teach the kids particularly well. As we moved into the 20th century, where books gave way to iPads and computers, Joe Black's kids went to school where they were lucky to get a desk to sit in much less a modern computer to learn on.

Meanwhile, Joe White's kids in Irvine got to go to the best schools in the country where they had one teacher for 30 students (instead of 300 students). They all had their own computers and they got a laptop to take home and do their homework on. Any wonder who is going to get the better grades and excel scholastically?

So now all these problems that have built up over time and finally coalescing into what mrsleeve described as "a bombed out Mogadishu." We have urban areas with highly concentrated levels of crime, violence, and poverty. Generations of people who have been precluded from building up capital that they could pass to their children. Larger global changes that have restructured what one can and can't do for a living. Manufacturing has largely left the building...and those are the jobs that people could fill when they couldn't get into or didn't want to get into school. Those are the kinds of things that kept little shitheads out of prison.

You remember those days? You could be a little shit and your dad would introduce you to uncle Erm and put your ass to work in the factory. Didn't matter if you had a high school diploma. You could even buy a home and raise a family on a workman's wage. You could be a little shit until 15-16 years old and then get your ass into a decent paying job and work your butt off until you died. Those opportunities are long gone.

So now little shits turn into big shits. they go off to prison and *their* little shits turn into even more dangerous shits. and the whole thing spirals downward until we get "bombed out Mogadishu's" that the rest of us have to deal with. And today, we're going to deal with this in the form of thousands of people losing their ability to pay for something as basic as running water...in the USA, what's portrayed as the richest country in the world. It seems insane that people would defend that process. But instead when I try and outline how we have some answering to do for what has happened in the past, I get a constant stream of personal insults. As far as I know I was able to make this post without any personal insults...interesting how that works ;)

The socially accepted term is African-Americans, your post, it's almost as bad as calling Native Americans 'redskins'. Sounds like you are a part of fueling the division this country is going through, as opposed to all of us being Americans, you want to break it down and further the concept of all of us not being equal by hammering inequality into the minds of civil servants. Yes, servants.

I educate cops, correctional officers, and district attorneys. Criminal Justice is hardly a liberal bastion. But, what was it someone said, "keep fucking that chicken"

Makes sense with how many uneducated and brainless LEO's I've encountered. Almost all of them I have met, ironically enough, in the vein you spoke of earlier in this thread are brainless statistic quoters without the ability to formulate their own thoughts, much like you mocked of corporate dwellers that are accountants that are stuck in some brainless system of numbers.

[smooth]

I've read a lot on fracking...besides being a rather thirsty process, can smooth shed some more light on what it's doing to the water table?

I hope you found that article I linked interesting.

The short of what I was referring to was that fracking does a number of things to our potable water: as you said it's a thirsty process. so one of the things it does is pulls water at incredible amounts and drops homeowners water tables. Farbin pointed out that he has a well that's only 75 feet deep. I've read and seen reports of people having to drill as deep as 300 feet to get to water.

The corporations also don't really have to abide by boundaries. If I lived next to you and we each had a well and we each used a fair share of the water *under* our property lines then we'd probably coexist just fine. but if I take my straw and send it on a diagonal *under* your property and drill down hundreds of feet below your well, I can tap "your" water resulting in your well going dry.

in addition to just water use, these companies have been exempted from regulation in regards to how much they use *and* the impacts they have on the water table. now we're getting reports that people's wells that still work are polluted and this has been attributed to the toxic slew that results from fracking.

My other point was about nuclear waste. If you'd like to look up more on that subject check out what's going on with Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/6-tanks-at-hanford-nuclear-site-in-wash-leaking/

My overall point was that private corporations are sucking and fucking our nation's potable water and the issues we're seeing in detroit are going to become nationwide. over time we're going to see these kinds of issue hitting impoverished communities and communities of color harder than other communities.

you can see how this applies in detroit, or for family ranchers in texas, or small farmers in imperial valley. across the board people without a lot of politics, social, and economic capital are going to get the short end of the stick.

so unless you are part of an extremely small sliver of this nation's wealthy, you have an oar to row in this boat along with the UN's position that drinking water should be a basic human right. because if it isn't, then don't expect to live long in the next couple decades unless you have a *lot* of disposable income to spend on things like drinking water.

one could say it falls under the penumbra of rights in the US Constitution. one will *not* say that, unfortunately, because the USSC is squarely on the side of corporations for the time being, but consistent with how past rulings found that even though the right to privacy is not actually in the Constitution it wouldn't make sense to have those other rights without the right to privacy. That's the penumbra (penumbra is like a hazy outline that kind of shadows the sun during an eclipse. you can see the edges of it even if it's not quite right in front of you.) of rights that the court has established must exist for the others to make any sense.

likewise, it doesn't make sense to have a right to bear arms or right to freedom of speech if we don't have a right to drink water. it's hard to comprehend how one could secure a right to carry a gun and defend personal liberty if that liberty didn't include the right to do the most basic function of human life--drinking water.

[smooth]

The socially accepted term is African-Americans[...]Sounds like you are a part of fueling the division this country is going through, as opposed to all of us being Americans, you want to break it down and further the concept of all of us not being equal by hammering inequality into the minds of civil servants. Yse, servants.

My explanation of how racial inequality has a lasting impact on current events is furthering the concept of us not being equal.
that's an interesting perspective.