Seeing its neighborhoods
today, where swarms of rats fatten on piles of garbage, it’s surprising to
learn that Baltimore was once the second most popular destination of early
American immigrants. Baltimore was the Silicon Valley of the early 1800s – a
vibrant and prosperous center of wonder and invention, home of our nation’s
first great railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, and of the amazing new electronic
communications technology beside its tracks, the telegraph.
But, as Craig R. Smith
and I explain in our book We Have Seen the
Future and It Looks Like Baltimore, the magic soon faded.
Baltimore is only 40
miles from Washington, D.C., and during the Civil War it got rich on federal
government contracts. But after the war, as Americans moved westward seeking
opportunity, a poorer Baltimore’s businesses became more and more dependent on
government money. Its American Dream was overtaken by a Progressive Dream in
which business meant government business, with political strings attached.
While many newer cities
shook off corrupt partisan politics, Baltimore sank deeper into one-party
Democrat machine politics. More than six decades ago, one boss mayor, Big Tommy
D’Alesandro had fun by putting his eight-year-old daughter on the telephone to
talk with those begging favors. Smith and I recount the kind of thing she would
say: “You want that building permit for your project? Here’s what you need to
do for us.”
The little girl who
learned thug politics at her father’s knee went on to become Nancy Pelosi, now
Speaker of the House of Representatives, who continues to act as if politics is
war. She strives to remake America into a new Progressive Baltimore full of
spoils devoured by rats – Democ-rats.
As entrepreneurs fled
from Baltimore, what remained were the poor. Italian-American bosses have been
replaced by African-American boss-politicians who take Washington money to keep
a sinking welfare state afloat. Baltimore is now among the murder and heroin
capitals of the United States, a perfect picture of where the Progressive Dream
takes a society.
Riots erupted in 2015 after
the death of a drug pusher in police custody and charges were filed against
four officers. Stores were looted – especially liquor stores and pharmacies for
their drugs. More than 200 police were injured by thrown stones and bottles
after being ordered by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake not to resist or arrest
the rioters, arsonists, and looters. In effect, she gave the order to let
Baltimore be robbed and burned.
“We also gave those who
wished to destroy space to do that as well, and we work very hard to keep that
balance,” the oh-so-Progressive Democratic Mayor Rawlings-Blake later explained
to reporters. Since 2015, many other Progressive cities have in varying degrees
likewise given in to the mob.
This is what the recent
clash between President Donald Trump and powerful Baltimore Congressman Elijah
Cummings is all about. Cummings during the riots stood quietly amid the looters
smashing the windows of a liquor store, yet he did nothing to stop them.
They were, after all,
Cummings’ voters. The mob was simply taking the next logical step – not waiting
for Democrat politicians to rob businesses with confiscatory taxes, but just
stealing private property themselves without the usual political middle man.
The mob was accustomed to getting what it wanted for free.
A vestige of the
greatness of Baltimore remains, especially in Johns Hopkins University, where
President Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson
earned world fame as a surgeon. In 2015 the world thrilled to images of Pluto
from the New Horizons spacecraft – designed and flown by scientists not at Cal
Tech or Houston’s Johnson Space Center, but at Johns Hopkins University’s
Advanced Physics Laboratory in Baltimore.
If its addiction to
government were cured, Baltimore could again become a great global center of
technology, healing, innovation, and the American Dream. But first, Baltimore
needs to be “woke” from its long Progressive nightmare.
Lowell Ponte is a former
think tank futurist and Roving Science Editor at Reader’s Digest magazine. He
writes a weekly column at WND.com.
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