The bigger the big cities get, the more micro-districts can be carved out, gerrymandered by race, divided by language, and capable of carrying more and more of the treasury back home to the machine. And if the cities can get big enough, fast enough, then they can outrace their own inevitable bankruptcies to seize control of the wealth of a nation. It’s the only hope of municipalities bulging with unfunded pensions, unfundable social welfare and a next generation of workers that doesn’t exist.
Money is not the issue. Urban political machines have always spent money like water counting on their cities being too big to fail. Right off City Hall in New York City sits the Tweed Courthouse, named after one of the most infamous bosses of the Tammany Hall political machine. Despite being a modest building, it cost four times more to build than London’s Houses of Parliament. Today it houses the headquarters of the Department of Education which is spending the city deep into debt. That just goes to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Obama’s crazed spending spree is nothing new in big cities where the debt is sky high and there is no way to cover it. Detroit is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Chicago is facing a frightening pile of debt. California’s municipalities are taking the entire state down with them and Bloomberg doubled New York’s debt during his time as mayor.
The urban political machines don’t fear bankruptcy. They embrace it. Crises create more opportunities. When people are hungry, it’s childishly easy to get them to march round demanding this and that and then using this and that as cover for even bigger thefts. Bailouts and recovery programs are rich wells full of money that can be plundered.
The score was never as big and rich as it was during the first heady days of Hope and Change. The machine operators are no longer playing around with a few billion here or there for urban recovery programs. Instead they’re juggling trillions. The amount of money at their disposal is mind boggling and so is their thievery.
Paying it back is not their problem. America, like Chicago, is too big to fail.
The machine operators live in a world where the people and the cities are collateral to be borrowed against. As long as they control governments, they imagine that there will always be greedy suckers ponying up a few trillion which the next generation will pay off and the one after that.
It never occurs to them that the rest of the world is filled with starving human collateral and the ruins of old cities. It never occurs to them that Chicago, Detroit and New York are just places where people made things and earned a living. And that a city without an economy is just Somalia or El Salvador with a lot of tall buildings.
America is now being run by the logic of the urban machine. The rules on which the cities run are being applied to the rest of the country when it comes to gun control, health care and race. The rules broke the cities and they are breaking the country. And there is no escaping the rules without breaking the power of the urban political machine that now controls the country.
Originally published at Sultan Knish.