Baltimore

Baltimore, officially the City of Baltimore, is the largest city in the U.S. state of Maryland, and the 26th-most populous city in the country. It is the largest independent city in the United States of America. Baltimore has more public monuments than any other city per capita in the country and is home to some of the earliest National Register historic districts in the nation, including Fell's Point (1969), Federal Hill (1970) and Mount Vernon Place (1971). More than 65,000 properties, or roughly one in three buildings in the city, are listed on the National Register more than any other city in the nation. Founded in 1729, Baltimore is the second largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.

Quotes

The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning... Baltimore shows where this leads. ~ The Wall Street Journal

Baltimore... The city hasn't been 'neglected'. It has been misgoverned into the ground. ~ Rich Lowry

Baltimore is not America's problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem... Toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore's problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. ~ John Nolte

Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable; because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats... Baltimore's preferred driver of growth has been government. ~ Rich Lowry

The imperative in Baltimore should be to think and act anew. But the left's takeaway will be that there's an urgent need for more of the same, as Baltimore and places like it continue to rot. ~ Rich Lowry

What we're witnessing in Baltimore is the pure definition of insanity; continuing to do the same thing and expect different results. ~ Allen West

Let's not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years. The men and women in charge have been Democrats... This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America's sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn't in the top 25. ~ The Wall Street Journal

I wish I were in Baltimore, I'd make secession traitors roar! ~ Union Dixie

C

Tommy Carcetti: It's Baltimore; no one lives forever.
- "Not for Attribution" (20 January 2008), written by Chris Collins, The Wire, Home Box Office.

Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”
- Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021

Whether it's in Ferguson or Baltimore, the response from senior officials, the president or the attorney general, is to vilify law enforcement. That's wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong. It’s endangering all of our safety and security.
- Ted Cruz, as quoted in "Ted Cruz blames Obama for death of Harris County sheriff's deputy", by Matt Levin, Houston Chronicle (31 August 2015).

D

I look upon my departure from Colonel Lloyd's plantation as one of the most interesting events of my life. It is possible, and even quite probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of slavery. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. I have ever regarded it as the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since attended me, and marked my life with so many favors. I regarded the selection of myself as being somewhat remarkable. There were a number of slave children that might have been sent from the plantation to Baltimore.
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Chapter 5.

Maryland Democrat and 2016 presidential aspirant Martin O'Malley called the Baltimore riots a 'wake-up call' for the entire country. O'Malley was a fixture in Baltimore politics and government for 24 years before Baltimore exploded last week. Was he asleep during that time? Eight years on Baltimore’s city council, eight years as Baltimore mayor, and eight years as Maryland’s governor. During much of O’Malley’s quarter century in power, he had an invulnerable Democratic majority in Annapolis, powerful Maryland Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate, and Democrats in charge in the White House. O’Malley’s tenure held promise for Maryland. But the promise was squandered when he failed to turn Maryland around...
No living Maryland Democrat has been better positioned than Martin O’Malley to remake Baltimore. William Schaefer, Maryland’s late governor and Baltimore mayor, is remembered for building the Camden Yards ballfield and cleaning up Baltimore’s once-dilapidated waterfront. But O’Malley will be remembered for his 'rain tax', crony capitalism, the jail debacle, and mass arrests. He will also be remembered for hubris: How else to describe a man who rushed to Baltimore from abroad to parade in front of the cameras during the riots? Today’s city hall has much to answer for, but O’Malley also deserves much of the blame for last week’s chaos in Maryland’s largest city. In fact, Baltimoreans heckled O’Malley when he appeared on street corners last week to mew at them about the riots. The people know their heroes.
- Richard J. Douglas, "How Martin O'Malley Created Today's Baltimore" (6 May 2015), National Review.

H

Officials raised property taxes 21 times between 1950 and 1985, channeling the proceeds to favored voting blocs and causing many homeowners and entrepreneurs — disproportionately Republicans — to flee. It was brilliant politics, as Democrats now enjoy an eight-to-one voter registration advantage.
- The Wall Street Journal, by Steve Hanke and Stephen Walters.

The immediate result of Black Lives Matter’s war on law enforcement was an epidemic of crime, as police officers decided that aggressive law enforcement was dangerous to their lives and careers. Homicides in the Ferguson area and in Baltimore jumped 60 percent. Virtually all the victims were blacks, revealing the hypocrisy of a movement for which black lives didn’t really matter — attacks on the law enforcement and on the 'power structure' did...
The Left is blind to the responsibility of inner-city populations for their off-the-charts violent-crime rates. The failure to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood is as characteristic of the progressive attitude as is its blindness to the betrayal of inner-city communities by Democrats, responsible almost entirely for the disgraceful condition of America’s cities. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and numerous other centers of out-of-control black poverty, failed public-school systems, and black-on-black violence are 100 percent controlled by the Democratic party and have been so for 50 to 100 years. Yet 95 percent of the black vote and 100 percent of the progressive vote continues to go to Democrats who oppress African Americans.
- David Horowitz, "Is the Left Even on America’s Side Anymore?" (8 January 2014), National Review.

L

Ervin Burrell: It's Baltimore, gentlemen. The Gods will not save you.
- "Dead Soldiers" (3 October 2004), written by Dennis Lehane, The Wire, Home Box Office.

Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall...
Baltimore itself. The city hasn't been 'neglected'. It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair...
The Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable; because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats.
- Rich Lowry, "Baltimore: Great Society Failure" (1 May 2015), National Review.

Baltimore is a high-tax city, with malice aforethought... Developers need to be lured to the city with subsidies, and the developers, in turn, contribute to politicians to stay in their good graces. This makes for fertile ground for the city’s traditional corruption... Baltimore's preferred driver of growth has been government... Baltimore has the fifth-highest murder rate among cities with a population of 100,000 or more. The schools, predictably, are a disaster, run by and for the teachers unions... The imperative in Baltimore should be to think and act anew. But the Left's takeaway will be that there's an urgent need for more of the same, as Baltimore and places like it continue to rot.
- Rich Lowry, "Baltimore: Great Society Failure" (1 May 2015), National Review.

M

The old town will not give you the time of your life; it is not a brazen hussy among cities, blinding you with its xanthous curls, kicking up its legs, inviting you to exquisite deviltries. Not at all. It is, if the truth must come out, a Perfect Lady. But for all its resultant narrowness, its niceness, its air of merely playing at being a city, it has, at bottom, the one quality which, in cities as in women, shames and survives all the rest. And that is the impalpable, indefinable, irresistible quality of charm.
- H. L. Mencken, quoted in Mencken: A Life, by Fred Hobson (1994), ISBN 0-8018-5238-2, p. 143

N

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America's problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem... Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican mayor. In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore city vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland. Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years...
As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.
- John Nolte, "Baltimore is a Democrat Problem, not America's Problem" (28 April 2015), Breitbart.

Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat... Toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore's problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor 'Space-to-Destroy'.
- John Nolte, "Baltimore is a Democrat Problem, not America's Problem" (28 April 2015), Breitbart.

Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heart-breakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence. Where I currently reside here in Watauga County, North Carolina, the poverty level is 31.3%. Median income is only $34,293. In both of those areas we are much worse off than Baltimore, that has a poverty rate of only 23.8% and a median income of $41,385. Despite all that, we don't riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others.
- John Nolte, "Baltimore is a Democrat Problem, not America's Problem" (28 April 2015), Breitbart.

Toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore's problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor 'Space-to-Destroy'.
- John Nolte, "Baltimore is a Democrat Problem, not America's Problem" (28 April 2015), Breitbart.

S

During the nineties, tolerant Baltimore's crime rate, much of it drug-fueled, rocketed upward, 75 percent of the city’s murders were drug-related; tough-on-crime New York's plummeted.
- Fred Siegel and Van Smith, City Journal

T

We are trying to help; we are trying to help reduce the violence in Baltimore city. It is a hard, hard game. Hard game. People get hurt who shouldn't, all the time. Citizens, police, family members, everybody. Okay? Even somebody who may be doing something wrong, that's petty, ends up getting hurt beyond a scope that shouldn't ever happen...
If we didn't care, we wouldn't come out in the street every day.
- Charles A. Thompson, Baltimorean police lieutenant, as quoted in Baltimore – April 25, 2015 (25 April 2015), by Dan Crapanzano

U

I wish I was in Baltimore, I'd make secession traitors roar! Right away, come away! Right away, come away!
- "Union Dixie"

W

Let's not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years. The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are 'progressive'. This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America's sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn't in the top 25. The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning...
Baltimore shows where this leads. It's time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, 'broken windows' policing, and education choice.
- The Wall Street Journal, "The Blue City Model" (29 April 2015), A14.

I was watching the news reports from Baltimore and hearing all the condemnations from some about being kept down and the lack of jobs, opportunity, good schools; then why do these blacks keep voting for the same people? And this isn't a phenomenon isolated to Baltimore. Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats; more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington, D.C. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta, even with all the successful black entertainers. Now, I remember the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson. That guy was a leader and even spoke at my high school Baccalaureate. But today, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has done such a bang-up job that the Atlanta Braves are moving to Cobb County! Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?
- Allen West, "The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore" (18 May 2015), National Black Republican Association.

Rioters blame whites. Well, they need to make sure they're specifically blaming the correct whites. Those on the left. Blacks have been herded into these inner city clusters, a new economic plantation and in this fiftieth year of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, well, the unintended, or maybe intended, consequences are deplorable...
This is not about an American failure, it is about a Democrat failure. And ask yourself, who were the ones who developed the concept of urban economic empowerment zone; as opposed to the ones who have produced urban depraved enslavement zones?
- Allen West, "The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore" (18 May 2015), National Black Republican Association.

The truth is that it is a culture of dependency as promulgated by the race-baiters and new plantation overseers of the inner city that has created what we’re seeing play out in Baltimore. There is where the blame lies, but there are very few who are willing to admit just that. Remember what ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith said? He wished that for one voting cycle, the black community would vote Republican. Heck, they could do no worse — and look, even the people of the State of Maryland decided to try something different and elected a Republican governor. Who, when finally asked, immediately activated the National Guard to quell the violence and chaos which the Democrat Mayor of Baltimore failed to comprehend, and control. Perhaps what we’re witnessing in Baltimore is the pure definition of insanity — continuing to do the same thing and expect different results.
- Allen West, "The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore" (18 May 2015), National Black Republican Association.

Yes, the dirty little secret that no one wants to admit is that Baltimore, and so many other urban areas and inner city communities in America are a reflection of the abject failure of liberal progressive socialist policies as advanced by the Democrat party. The preeminent question is whether or not those in Baltimore and other places will recognize who is truly responsible for their plight. Or will they continue to be manipulated and propagandized by the liberal progressive media and the poverty pimps like the one supposedly heading down from New York City... This is not about an American failure, it is about a Democrat failure. And ask yourself, who were the ones who developed the concept of urban economic empowerment zones; as opposed to the ones who have produced urban depraved enslavement zones?
- Allen West, "The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore" (18 May 2015), National Black Republican Association.