Nick's Blog

Detroit will have primary elections for Charter Commission, City Council, and Mayor in a few weeks. Voters know something about the Council candidates, and the only Mayoral candidate of any stature seems to be Dave Bing, but the Charter Commission is under the RADAR. This is probably exactly backwards.

Council and the Mayor are up for reelection in four years. But the Charter Commission's decisions will be binding for the foreseeable future. The last one was decades ago, and the one before that was apparently elected in 1918.

It's very difficult to get a copy of the City Charter. I saw one once, in a lawyer's office. The lawyer told me the only way to get a copy was go to the City Clerk, and that they were so rare they were individually numbered. So ideally the new Charter will include a requirement that it be available on the web.

I'd like changes a little more drastic than most of the candidates propose. Most of them seem to think six or seven districts would be fine. Unfortunately That means each Council member represents 100,000-200,000 people. Which is simply too many. I want a political system where an ordinary person with a full-time job, no rich friends, no preexisting name recognition, and good ideas can win.

And that just doesn’t happen very often in Districts that size. The only cheap successful campaigns are run by guys like the Lamars Lemmons. Lamar III was a former State Rep, Lamar II is a current State Rep, and Lamar IV was candidate in the First District a while back. Successful campaigns by guys with no name recognition, or big-name support, tend to cost a bundle. Steve Tobocman, for example, spent more than $50,000.

I also want a political system where anybody can walk down the street and talk to someone with authority. I can do that in Woodbridge. But if the districts have 100,000-200,000 people in them very, very, few Detroiters will get to be down the street from a Council person. After all State House Districts are smaller than that (average: 90,000),and most folks don’t share a neighborhood with their State Rep. So I’d say the districts should be a lot smaller than that. Ideally 10,000, which results in 70-75 Council districts

It would also be nice if we could end the constant feuding between the Council and the Mayor. Take the Cobo feud. What happened was the Mayor’s office and the suburbs agreed on what exactly should be done. To get agreement the Mayor had to make concessions. But the Council was not part of the discussions, and they did not like the concessions. So there was a fight and we almost lost the Auto Show. It would also be nice if the Council could remove a Mayor (thus preventing the Kwame-circus), and each Mayoral appointee was responsible to the voters (which discourages corruption).

Guess what? If Detroit had a Parliamentary system we’d have that. The new Mayor would be elected by the Council, and serve at the will of the Council. His Cabinet would be Council members. If the Mayor tries to use $6 million in tax money to cover up an affair the Council can simply can fire the Mayor. If the people really hate one of his appointees they can vote the guy out of office next time. This would have the additional advantage that losing Mayoral candidates would stay in City government. If we keep a few at-large Council slots we can always say the top vote-getter gets first shot at running the city.

So my ideal charter has lots of City Councilors elected by district, and a couple elected at-large. There are no other elected officials. The at-large candidate with the most votes gets to be Mayor, and appoints a Cabinet from the Legislature. If he does something stupid the Council can replace him. There’re transparency requirements, ethics rules, and an independent commission that confirms those requirements are met.

That’s my dream. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And if it happened I think everyone would be happy.

What’s everyone else’s view of the new Charter? Are my ideas for it good?Any Charter Commission candidates reading this?

It sounds like little has changed since I graduated a decade ago.

The state take-over didn't help. It's doubtful a new take-over would work.

So we're pretty screwed.

The Torys are in trouble. They did quite well in the election a month and a half ago -- they won 143 of 308 seats -- so they decided to govern like a majority party. First they tried to cut public financing of political parties. This, combined with a gloomy economic outlook, united the opposition against them.

The coalition would be the NDP and the Liberals. The NDP would have 25% of the Cabinet, but not the Ministry of Finance. They also wouldn't have the Deputy Prime Ministership, but that job isn't very powerful. A Deputy PM is a toy of the PM, so it wouldn't make much sense for a Deputy PM to be from a different party than the PM.

This Coalition will only control 114 seats directly, but the Bloc Quebecois apparently plans to support it. The Bloc can't join a Federal government, because they want to end it, but they do get to vote in Parlaiment.

Right now the biggest problem apparently is that the Liberals don't have a leader. Their current leader (Stéphane Dion) announced he'd resign right after the election, so they're in the middle of a leadership race.

About a month ago a summit to solve the Zimbabwe problem failed miserably. The leader of the opposition couldn't leave the country because his passport was full, the government couldn't give him a new one because they were out of paper. De facto that was a win for Mugabe. He currently controls everything, so a non-summit means he keeps everything.

A more recent summit was also a win for Mugabe. Regional heads-of-state caved in to him. So it's pretty clear the cagey old bastard is beating the hapless Tsvangirai politically. Militarily he's unassailable. Zimbabwe's military is in the tank for Mugabe.

Unfortunately he's got a country to run. And it's not going well. Inflation is insane -- 231,000,000% -- and the employment rate is 20%. Apparently the army's rank-and-file are getting frustrated. Yesterday they were waiting in line at a bank all day, and some started a riot. The riot police weren't too keen to restore order.

This is a very bad sign for Mugabe. African leaders almost never attack one of their own, but if there's a revolution in Harare Mugabe will no longer be one of their own. And if the troops are rioting they ain't likely to stop a People Power-style revolution.

As I predicted government looting was followed a few days later by a rebel advance. Ordinary people are doing their best to flee from the unrest, the UN agreed to send 3,100 more troops to the region. The UN head of peacekeeping hopes those troops are white.

He's got good reasons to prefer white troops. A major one is that western countries spend actual money training their soldiers. Third world countries are notorious for being cheap. Many of their soldiers are crappy shots because they never get to practice. The government just won't pay for bullets. Actual flight time in combat aircraft is equally hard to find -- very few combat pilots in poor countries have more than 100 hours actual flight time. Not to mention the fact western military forces typically have all kinds of cool gadgets. During the first Gulf War American tanks were dominant because our electronic gadgets could see Iraqi tanks before they could see us. We also had better guns and more training, so we killed them before they could see us.

There's also a political value to European troops. If a European country sends troops that means it cares what's going on in Congo. Really cares. That ups the diplomatic ante quite a bit. And signals to Rwanda and Kabila that it would be in their best interest to solve the dispute ASAP, rather than wait it out.