THIS PAGE
TO A FRIEND
If I were mayor of Detroit
Part 2Thursday May 08, 2008
By Ellis Washington
~ Ellis Washington (a paraphrase of Justice Clarence Thomas's grandfather)
Many of the policy assumptions in this column are presently untenable in Detroit (and America) but could easily become workable once "We the People" regain control of all our courts and force judges (and politicians) at the threat of the Treason Clause to follow faithfully the original intent of the Constitution's Framers according to Aricle 2, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution – "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers [=Judges & Congress] of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors."
My column "What I'd do as president" received more enthusiastic responses than any other column I've written to date. In that opus, I believe that I have struck a poignant chord with the American people, as well as with people as far away as Brazil, China, Israel, Africa, Australia and other lands. I continued this theme and applied it to Detroit, the city of my birth, in my column "If I were mayor of Detroit." This is Part 2 of that effort.
Using my campaign theme borrowed from Justice Clarence Thomas' memoir, I would frequently and emphatically tell every Detroit resident: "The damn party's over!" I would immediately put into effect my policy initiatives collectively called "Operation Kick-A--" – polices that are pro-American, pro-Ronald Reagan, pro-free market, anti-bum, anti-welfare state policies that will apply to all city government departments, from the mayor's office to a trainee assistant in the Department of Sanitation.
Policy No. 1 – I would turn Detroit into a "Union-free Zone." For the past three months, Detroit has been entangled in the American Axle strike, which to date has destroyed or stopped manufacturing operations in 29 U.S. factories, affecting over 37,000 salaried workers and over 4,600 hourly workers … for what?!
This idiotic and untimely strike was perpetrated by our local cabal of union thugs after GM had already settled with the national union – United Auto Workers (UAW). Detroit's local UAW said their strike is for "local concerns." These union hacks have held the free market hostage and crippled free enterprise in Detroit and other now "rustbelt" cities for over 120 years. Enough is enough.
I can hear the union leaders and their membership complaining now: "Mayor Ellis Washington is trying to break the union." I'm not trying to break the union; I'm trying to kill the damn union and bury it, forever! Why? Because labor unions are un-American, anti-constitutional, anti-capitalist, thoroughly corrupt, but most diabolically, promote an envious, lazy, group-think mentality wherever unionism thrives – from the academy and the National Education Association to city, state and federal workers, from mega-corporations to the meter maids.
Therefore, as mayor I would turn Detroit into a "Union-free Zone." President Reagan, in August 1981, when faced with naked union thuggery, eventually broke the union and fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers who refused to return to work – people that so selfishly and cavalierly put America's air safety in jeopardy.
Policy No. 2 – I would urge all business leaders and citizens throughout the metro-Detroit area that still believe in free enterprise to put money into a "New Media Fund" creating an Internet, TV, radio and print media founded upon conservative, free-market, pro-American principles.
Here, I fell like I'm in Stalin's gulag. The only conservative radio we get in Detroit is piped in from other venues like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (New York), Dr. Michael Savage (San Francisco) or Laura Ingraham (Washington, D.C.). I would champion a truly free press locally that will present a "fair and balanced" view of the news in line with the original intent of the Constitution's Framers, not just the liberal, socialist, communist side of a policy argument.
Policy No. 3 – Grab your bootstraps, baby! Any resident of Detroit, whether educated, non-educated, black or white, students or retirees, white-collar, blue-collar, or no-collar, who willingly follows the rule of law and is motivated to work daily at self-improvement by pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, like Booker T. Washington taught, and avoid bad life choices, it will be heaven for you. If not, and you take the W.E.B. Dubois-NAACP-Rev. Jeremiah Wright's demand, protest, raise-hell-only approach, Detroit will be hell for you.
Policy No. 4 – To fight crime, I would reinstitute the undercover police units called STRESS (Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets). This was a very effective crime-fighting program instituted in the early 1960s before the city went to hell in the riots of 1967. STRESS put thieves, loiterers, gangbangers, hoochie mamas and other criminal elements to flight and made all law-abiding citizens (black and white) feel safe to enjoy life again.
However, Detroit's first black mayor, that Rev. Jeremiah Wright-esque demagogue, the five-term Coleman A. Young (1974-94), in 1974 ran on a platform to disband STRESS, which at the time was a nationally recognized police crime-fighting unit. You see how well that worked out for us. Thanks, Mayor Young!
Policy No. 5 – Detroit will not be a sanctuary city. No amnesty for illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists or Muslim terrorist supporters. I would push for a sheriff in the mode of Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio (perhaps one of his protégées) to become sheriff of Wayne County.
Sen. Joe McCarthy said it best: "You [all Americans] cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers ... without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder."
Policy No. 6 – Following the paradigm of the city of Chicago, I would turn Detroit's neglected and mismanaged waterfront into a world-class economic juggernaut with gleaming skyscrapers called, "The Gold Coast II," by making all waterfront property south of Jefferson Avenue to the Detroit River, from Cobo Hall east to Grosse Pointe, a "No Hobo Zone." Why?
Because other than Cobo Hall and GM World Headquarters, this prime real estate is largely populated by substandard, dilapidated or abandoned business, factories, homes ... and hobos. As mayor, I would put forth perhaps the first proposal by any big city mayor in history by willingly annexing in perpetuity this 6.5-mile strip of land to neighboring Grosse Pointe. My reasoning can be found in my recent column comparing these two cites.
Policy No. 7 – I would put an amnesty on all applications for new strip clubs, casinos, porn shops and liquor stores, and make it very onerous for existing businesses of these types to operate in Detroit. Michigan has more strip clubs per capita than any other state in the America – 72 in total, 44 in Wayne county, 34 in Detroit alone and ZERO in neighboring Oakland county.
Through my reform policies collectively called, "Operation Kick-A--" I would endeavor to turn Detroit and all of Wayne County into a magnificent region where lazy bums, poverty pimp preachers, union thugs, unscrupulous businessmen, high school dropouts, gangbangers, welfare queens, deadbeat dads and your garden variety imbeciles, hoochie mamas, jailbirds and their enablers – the entire corrupt liberal Democrat Machine – will no longer be welcomed in my city, unless they transformed themselves and their worldview from being takers to becoming producers.
I would transform Detroit into a real Renaissance city befitting Renaissance men of the past, like Galileo, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Burke, Blackstone, Booker T. Washington, Churchill, Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, instead of following these corrupt, socialist hacks we currently have ruining Michigan, like Conyers (husband and wife), Granholm, Kilpatrick (mother, father and son), Stabenow, Archer, Dingell, the Levin brothers and their ilk.
Going back to Rep. John Dingell, since 1955 these dishonorable men and women have built their entire careers upon the abject ignorance, poverty and misery of my people and all those other citizens who have foolishly wasted their lives believing in the seductive and addictive lies of Leviathan government and liberalism – diabolical policies predicated on stealing money from thy neighbor and giving the spoils to thyself and to thy lazy constituencies and calling the ill-gotten gains Social Security, universal health care, "a tax increase on the rich," "a loan," "a gift." I call it legalized extortion.
Detroit, the damn party's over!
Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality:
The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil:
Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).
Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
