« Just when you thought white virtue-signalers could not abase themselves more | Trump saved DC from the mob »
June 8, 2020

Chutzpah Cities: Bailouts, beggings, and food deserts, starting with Minneapolis

By Monica Showalter

There are a lot of blue cities out there with an unusual sense of entitlement.  We got the first whiff of it during the coronavirus stimulus debate, as mismanaged blue metropolises demanded pension and other unrelated bailouts from Congress from what were supposed to be emergency response funds. 

But now in the wake of riots, they're really getting bad.  They're demanding taxpayer bailouts for riot damage after failing to protect their cities, all so they could claim they were woke.  They're begging big box retailers not to pull up stakes and leave after allowing them to be trashed and looted.  They're complaining about sudden food deserts appearing as inner-city shopkeepers are thrown out of business after being robbed, burned, and destroyed and wondering why these stores don't re-open.  It all underlines an amazing failure to recognize any consequences for bad decisions taken, coupled with a howling sense of entitlement.  Call these solid blue failures "Chutzpah Cities."

Exhibit A is Minneapolis, whose far-left mayor failed to protect his city from a multi-night orgy of looting and rioting and now wants a $55-million taxpayer bailout to sweep the entire mess under the rug.

According to Big League Politics:

Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey is ordering city officials to begin a wide-ranging query of the damage done to the city's infrastructure from the race riots that began last week after the death of George Floyd, planning on requesting a federal bailout for the city to repair the damages done by "protestors."

Early preliminary estimates gauge the price tag of property damage from the riots at more than $55 million dollars. Frey is already working with U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and representatives Ilhan Omar and Betty McCollum on a potential bailout package for the city.

Any apology for bad decisions?  Any promise to return to rule of law so taxpayers don't have to keep doing this to eternity?  Normally, bailouts come with tough conditions for reform to ensure future sustainability.  But Frey has no intention of reform; he just wants you to bankroll his latest social experiment.

Reform in Minneapolis comes not raising the price for rioting and looting and promising to enforce law in order, but by getting rid of the police.  Frey's lashed to the mast with a rabid far-left city council, which has enacted a veto-proof majority to de-fund the entire police force.  That'll ensure that riots and looting don't happen again, right?  Apparently, the next spray-shooter can rest easy and fire away, as the police will be gone.  It's an idea so bad that it sounds as if an enemy dreamed it up.  It can only be called a plan for permanent bailouts, because the results will be a disaster.  The plan seems to be to make Minneapolis a second Cuba, always looking for the next Uncle Sugar to sustain its communist failures.  And the productive members of society are supposed to go along with this, gladly emptying their pocketbooks.

Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, was last seen doing some kind of chicken dance, which gives you an idea as to how busy he's been:

He's not the only one running a blue Chutzpah City.

How about the mayor of Chicago, who, after failing to protect her city's big box retailers from an orgy of looting, called upon these establishments not to leave her city?

No promises of no looting again ever.  Just calls to stay and get looted again.  No sane business would take her up on her offer.  There are plenty of other places to go, where law and order still mean something and where making money doesn't have to be discounted by losses from looters.  The citizens of these blue cities are likely to go where they go as well.  All of the major blue cities are losing people, something that makes the big boxers even less likely to be able to turn a profit.  Fewer people, fewer buyers, all the result of blue-city policies, which include high taxes and low job creation rates.  Chicago for sure is among them.

Then there's this plaintive whine:

Brought on by this:

What the heck did they think would happen if they allowed rich, white Antifa trust-fund bunnies to go out and loot struggling small inner-city businesses with little cushion for recovery?  Thomas Lifson predicted that in these pages very early.  People who work 16-hour days and operate on razor-thin margins don't recover from mob assaults easily.  Did they really think these businesses could shake the losses from mass looting and destruction like water off a duck's back?  The hard reality is, trash your small, struggling businesses, and there won't be small, struggling businesses.  Good luck getting the tax revenue to pay for the bloated bureaucracies.

The whole thing underlines the ugly reality about leftists: that they lack introspection and firmly believe they have nothing to answer for.  Kevin Williamson has an excellent piece on that here. For the left, there's no sense of making things better with this bunch, there's just an adherence to the socialist template, failure after failure, letting someone else pay the bill. All we see in this wretched picture is entitlement and greed, even when they are sitting there in the mud, the victims of their own abhorrent decisions. This is chutzpah in the extreme, the classic phony plea of man who killed his parents, and then told the judge to have mercy on him for he was an orphan.

It calls to mind that they really do need to bear the consequences of their own bad decisions, hard as it may be. This may be the only way to halt the extreme leftward slide of the Democratic Party. That may well be the real meaning of President Trump's presidency, for surely he will put a stop to this, as long as he remains in office.

Imagine how bad it would be if Joe Biden were in the presidential saddle instead. These blue cities, it is reported, are already supposedly waiting or their 'Biden bailouts, refusing to cut spending, refusing to reform, waiting for Biden to come onboard to bail them out, knowing that Trump will see right through them and their toddler-like entitlement and tell them no. It underlines why Biden must never be elected president. Just say no to these spoiled brats who fail to learn from their mistakes, and like socialists, just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.

Image credit: Daily Caller Twitter screen shot.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com