Pirate's Cove

And segregation from over 50 years ago. After discussing several Conservative articles blaming the failure of Baltimore on Liberal policies, New Republic writer Rebecca Leber writes in her article entitled Liberal Policies Didn’t Fail Baltimore. Here’s What Did.

Conservatives base this logic—that the city somehow proves government investment and social programs are bad policy—on a selective history of Baltimore, noting for instance that its residents have elected only one non-Democratic mayor since the 1940s. But Baltimore’s problems stretch further back, to institutionalized racial discrimination in the early 20th century. Federal and local policymakers of the time redlined areas with “undesirable racial concentrations” to omit them from mortgage insurance programs.

Most of those policies were ruled illegal and/or unconstitutional. Even community covenants which forbid homeowners to sell their properties to Blacks were deemed illegal. All the rules, covenants, laws, and such weren’t just a Southern thing, but were present throughout the country, especially in cities that tended to lead Democrat 100 years ago, and including the north, as Blacks migrated out of the South due to their jobs being replaced by machines. And those “racial discrimination” policies were pushed mostly be Democrats as official platforms.

And over the century, the same neighborhoods faced one destructive policy after another, from mass incarceration to the rise of predatory banks.

If you do the crime and get busted, you’ll do the time. As for predatory banks, this occurs amongst the entire population. But, this is all a way to deflect attention and the discussion away from reality. You may have started drinking because of things other people did, but, after being an alcoholic for 40+ years, the blame is on you.

“If the goal of early segregationist policies was to concentrate black Baltimoreans in a single location, separated from opportunity, then it worked,” Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate. “More importantly, it’s never been unraveled; there’s never been a full effort to undo and compensate for the policies of the past. Indeed, the two decades of drugs and crime that marred Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s helped entrench the harm and worsen the scars of the city’s history.”

Except, this wasn’t planned, it just happened, particularly as Whites moved out when Blacks moved in, turning White urban neighborhoods Black (the discussion of “why” is a different discussion). Let’s also not forget that Blacks and Liberals are now complaining about “gentrification”, ie, White people moving into the neighborhoods and revitalizing them. Here’s where it gets most amusing

Democrats exacerbated these problems not by embracing the policies of the left. Rather, they dug the hole deeper by yawing to the right. Aggressive policing, tougher drug sentencing, slashing the budgets of school and public housing and parks—throughout Baltimore’s history, lawmakers at the local, state, and federal level adopted policies that entrenched poverty and segregation in the city.

So, what they’re saying, beyond that More Liberal Policies Are Needed, is that Liberals are against law and order, and are for people doing all sorts of hard drugs. Democrats have fought any cuts tooth and nail, and usually see an increase in budgets, not them being slashed. Of course, since the actual tax base keeps falling, they have to raise taxes to pay for the programs, resulting in a further erosion of the tax base, which means they have to raise the taxes, and around we go.

President Barack Obama hinted at the need for assistance in off-the-cuff remarks this week, though it’s unlikely to come from federal politicians. “If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could,” he said, adding, “I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law-and-order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue.” Conservatives keep trying to change the conversation.

So, the “proper” conversation is apparently to not only keep doing the liberal policies that have failed, but to make them even more liberal. How’s that worked out in Detroit?

Crossed at Right Wing News.