Payne: Please, Mr. Holder, stop helping

Posted by hpayne on May 7, 2012

“This is unacceptable,” Attorney General Eric Holder said of the bloodbath that is killing two black men a week in Detroit. Obama’s top cop told the NAACP’s annual dinner in Detroit Sunday night that the statistics were “shocking” and his administration is directing “unprecedented” resources to reducing young people’s exposure to violence.

Please, Mr. Holder, stop helping us.

Federal policies from public housing projects to welfare payments paying for children out of wedlock have set the table for today’s urban violence – violence bred by 80 percent birth illegitimacy rates that leave young males growing up fatherless, uneducated, and poor.

Indeed, as Holder spoke, The Detroit News told the tale of The Martin Luther King Apartments near downtown Detroit – a sprawling, federally-subsidized, 481-unit, low-income housing compound that’s been taken over by drug dealers and other criminals.

“We’re the forgotten people of Detroit,” MLK resident Sharonda Hawkins – a gun strapped to her belt – told The News. Her husband was gunned down there last year – a nameless statistic among in the hundreds of Detroiters murdered every year even as the city’s establishment trumpets each downtown restaurant opening as evidence the city is “coming back.”

While not as violent as infamous public projects like now-defunct Cabrini Green in Chicago, MLK-like apartments have also become federally-funded breeding grounds for violence, says Bill Johnson, a Michigan View columnist and veteran Detroit writer. Such complexes, explain Johnson, house concentrations of welfare moms and their children who are preyed on by drug dealers as both clients and drug couriers. Like the giant Cabrinis of old, such compounds are easily controlled by territorial gangs.

Such single families are the result of decades of federal welfare programs – expanded under President Obama – that have displaced the father in the home. Single parenthood, the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector writes, is a leading cause of poverty – and fuels every young male dysfunction, from school dropouts, to adult illiteracy, to criminal behavior.

Yet, incredibly, the Obama administration has just produced an ad celebrating single parenthood in the form of Julia – a mother who is dependent on cradle-to-grave government handouts. In this Obama campaign vision of the American family, a male never enters Julia’s – or her son Zachary’s – life. In this fairy tale, Julia starts a government-funded “web business.”

In urban reality, the odds are the Julia and Zach wind up in MLK apartments, terrorized by drug lords, her son a potential victim (over 100 Detroiters have been killed this year already) or recruit (60 percent of inner city black high school dropouts will spend time in prison).

Faced with these truths, Holder seemed to be speaking from another planet Sunday. “Across the administration, we’re working in a range of other innovative ways to achieve fairness and expand opportunity ” from successfully advocating for the reduction of the unfair and unjust 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses – to launching a new, Department-wide Diversity Management Initiative,” Holder said. And this will stem the violence how?

Maybe next time AG Holder comes to Detroit, he’ll get out more.

 

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