The Field of Dreams
Detroit — the city that powered America to victory in World War 2 — has experienced what demographer Kurt Metzger called an “incredible” fall in population, plummeting 25% in the last decade. Michigan isn’t doing much better. It lost 800,000 jobs in the same period.
Now the city stands to collect even less money on a smaller base, as Detroit fell below the 750,000 person major city threshold it once invoked to impose higher rates. With the city’s collapse comes a corresponding reduction in political clout. The Detroit Free Press rhetorically wondered whether it still had enough people to support two Congressional districts or whether that would have to fall to one.
The Wall Street Journal says the exodus of residents was primarily driven by the black middle class heading for the suburbs. The momentum is so great that some pundits wondered whether “you put a bottom under it”. But the Detroit is only one of several cities which have seen heavy population losses. New Orleans has lost nearly 30% of its population, followed by Detroit itself, and Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
Detroit resident Will Wafer thought back with wonder to the time when people still wanted to live in Motor City. “Will Wafer, 54, a lifelong Detroiter, said the U.S. Census numbers, released Tuesday, are sad but not surprising given what residents of the city deal with, including high auto and home insurance rates and corruption. ‘I remember a time when every house was occupied,’ he said.”
The city’s decline had been in progress for some time. As early as 1961 Time Magazine bannered “Decline in Detroit”, already highlighting the factors which would have been familiar today. “Its problems run so deep that they can be solved only by the effort of labor, management, -’government and citizenry—working in a spirit that once made Detroit the symbol of economic dynamism.”
In 2007 the BBC had a nearly identically titled piece: The Decline of Detroit. The themes were surprisingly unchanged, except for one new factor. It followed the disillusionment of Claire McClinton.
Claire’s whole family followed in their footsteps and became “Flintsones,” working for GM – and so did Claire.
They were loyal members of the autoworkers union, the UAW, which won increasing benefits for its members, with average wages of more than $50,000 plus overtime.
“We respected the union then,” she said. “We believed it was the union that had delivered us the American dream.”
What brought things down, some said, was Globalization. Plants went up in Japan, then Korea and then China. But if Globalization were indeed to blame, its baneful effects stopped outside the state line.
But 400 miles south of Flint, another group of car workers are feeling very different.
They work in Toyota’s huge Camry factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, and receive, by their standards, generous pay and benefits.
Toyota is the fastest-growing car company in the United States, and it is building a new factory every year to keep up with demand.
And it is set to overtake GM this year as the world’s largest car company by sales.
For Laura Wilshire, from Ashland, Kentucky , life is good.
“This is the top notch job in the area,” she told the BBC.
When David Frum wrote Detroit’s obituary in 2009 he gave three reasons for its cause of death. The first was the collapse of its auto industry. “Two other factors have to be considered. The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. … The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.”
In other words, it failed to adapt; it believed the good times were a given. You just had to go where the lights were shining and they would continue to shine because that was the nature of things. Claire McClinton may have believed that Detroit was the city that the UAW built. And for those who subscribed to this premise the obvious answer to the problem of expandng prosperity was more of the UAW. This follows Reynold’s Law, named after Glenn Reynolds, the blogger, who originated the argument. Reynolds argued that societies often fail to understand the drivers of success and conflate its accidents with its essence. So when they want more of the essence they invest in more of the accidents.
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
This has the tragic effect of luring in victims like ants to a jar of honey. They come for the goods, not the things that created the goods. And they empty the jar. What killed Detroit? Maybe the killers are still at large because the same tendencies are still in play. Mayor Bing thinks the answer to his problems is to bulldoze a quarter of the city straight into the junkpile. Get the city back to the time when the magic was still good and the magic will return.
So his plan is to bulldoze approximately 10,000 houses and empty buildings over the next 3 years and direct new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the areas that the city plans to bulldoze, the residents would be offered the opportunity to relocate to a better area. For buildings that have already been abandoned, the city could simply use tax foreclosure proceedings to reclaim them. Of course if there were some residents that did not want to move, eminent domain could be used to force them out.
So which areas would be bulldozed and which areas would be left standing?
Nobody knows yet, and those decisions could make a lot of people angry.
There is a great climate for investment in the former Motor City, or so Bing thinks. But the Detroit News says that past efforts to remake the city have done more harm than good. “Mayor Dave Bing wants to save Detroit by persuading residents to leave their homes for better neighborhoods, but the city has struggled to accomplish the smallest of relocation projects — even when they involve cash incentives.”
In one case, the city has spent $19 million buying land for an industrial park on the east side that has attracted one tenant. In another, an effort to build a safety buffer near Coleman A. Young International Airport has cost at least $28 million and lasted 17 years, even though it was supposed to wrap up in 18 months.
Maybe because changing the accidents — just like moving people into new shiny housing — isn’t the answer, but the outcome. Yet hope in government — and in the unions — to fix things still springs green in some resident’s breasts. Bing believes even the population decline can be fixed by challenging it in court. He is determined to find the missing people out there — using city generated building permit applications as a basis — so that the city can apply for state and federal dollars.
For Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the magic number is 40,000.
The city needs to identify at least 40,000 people who live in Detroit but were not counted in the 2010 census. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Bing said the city’s population needs to be at least 750,000 to bring in much-needed dollars from the state and federal governments….
“We are in a fiscal crisis, and we have to fight for every dollar,” Bing said in announcing that the city will seek a recount. “We can’t afford to let these results stand.”
Bing said every resident who is counted by the census will bring in about $10,000 to Detroit over the next decade for schools, roads, hospitals and social service programs such as Medicaid. Bing said the city also is in danger of losing millions of dollars in state revenue sharing if the population numbers stand.
Bing’s approach highlights the war that Frum alluded to but never quite described: the eternal battle between the thing-makers and the dream-merchants. The contrary arguement to the belief that the UAW built Detroit’s prosperity was that Henry Ford built it — built it by faith in the reality of things. In that view wealth comes from the existence of things like cars, machines, buildings and such, and the intellectual and physical means to make them. In contrast, the alternative theory is that wealth arises from such things as collective bargaining agreements, laws, aspirations and rights. In a word, “if you build it, thy will come”. Mayor Bing’s plan to build developments recalls nothing so much as the South Seas cargo cults who believed all that was necessary to make the skies rain with goodies was to build a dirt airstrip and palm-leaf control tower to attract resupply flights from somewhere. “If you build it, they will come”.
Who “they” is remains unclear. But they are out there.
“Building” in this case doesn’t mean producing the actual product. “Building” means building the dream, constructing the appurtenances of the actual things, not the things. It means creating the “rights”, specifying the entitlements, winning the court cases to increase the population so all will be well. There are some who doubt this will actually work. But there are an equal number who think it will. The war between the thing-makers and the dream-merchants has been going on for a very long time, perhaps since the Tower of Babel and at least through the Cold War.
Some pessimists believe that Detroit is a foretaste of what America could become — or has already become. That the belief in Hope and Change is really the same magical thinking as increasing the population by winning the court case: the last stage of a terminally collapsing system. It is like the lottery ticket on which a jobless man expends the last few remaining dollars in his pocket, the final triumph of the Dream Merchant amidst the ruins of the Kingdom of Things.
My guess is that Bing will fail. The people of Detroit will go elsewhere. Some to opportunity but others to where the things are still good; to the ATM machine and not what is behind the ATM machine. And there they will reapply the magic that once made Detroit a field of dreams. More unions, more entitlements, more free stuff. If you build it, they will come.
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Obviously, it’s the poisonous race issues. Detroit has been a black city for decades. Political Correctness prevents an honest discussion about what’s killing Detroit.
Mayor Bing, slash taxes and regulatory requirements, in order to make it a haven for investment. De-certify the unions, they are holding you back as well. You may need some help from the Democrats who run Michigan for some of those things, so it could be a bridge too far. Yeah, yeah, I know, it will bring nasty greedy conservative types who produce things and foul the earth and exploit workers and stuff, but Dude, its the only way forward. What do you have to lose, besides your faith in a failed ideology?
The thing is that, between hipsters, dopesters, artistes, and other pretenders, there probably are +40,000 to be found in Detroit.
Lots of underground there. See here for just a smidgen of the underground above ground
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/fight_the_blight_another.php
Hmmm….he needs to find 40,000 more people, and he’s bulldozing houses….
Why not combine the two issues, and make large sections of Detroit into minimum-security prisons? He can house prisoners in the would-be demolished houses, have them maintained by prison labor, count them in his population (but not worry about their votes)….he could even arrange to take in prisoners currently housed in other states.
He could even name it the Green Urban Landscape Automatic Gentrification program — or GULAG for short.
yes … many themes here. first, I hadn’t heard of this “Reynold’s Law”, and I am somewhat skeptical of it. say you have a gold mine. it’s rational to join the crowd and dig for gold. then the gold runs out. boo. or, a tragedy of the commons: the village green can support twenty sheep, but whose twenty sheep? try for thirty sheep and you get no sheep. it’s not that having a pickaxe, or a sheep, or a college degree is a guarantee of anything, but in certain places and times, it is entirely rational.
second, I will note that even Long Beach, California (adjacent to Los Angeles, sharing the port) is suffering much as Detroit in some ways, and with less excuse. Abandoned business properties on major boulevards are bulldozed by the city. The local big employer, McDonnell-Douglas turned Boeing, has been losing jobs for twenty years. Integrated with LA, probably no more than 10% (at most) of the local population ever worked for the local employer, but even so.
Re Detroit, there have been urban exodus to suburbia since WWII, with occassional small countertrends, here and there. Yes, Detroit has some horrible race relations, but shares that with many medium to large cities throughout the country. Actually, problem properties in Long Beach cluster around the black neighborhoods, but not entirely. Old boulevard businesses lost out to shopping centers from the 1960s through the 1990s, just as the shopping centers have declined in the last decade, losing in part to the Internet, and to destination sites like The Grove or The Spectrum, and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target in the middle.
Things – change. Globalization is a huge factor, and it may be Detroit is just in the vanguard of collapse. The US middle-class has been decimated, and if that’s a 10% loss, it’s been decimated maybe four times in twenty years, and should stand by for a couple more rounds.
But we can’t blame it all on evil (read: cheap) foreigners, look at your Toyota plant. Detroit’s Big 3 have been unbearably slow and stupid in design and management, to this day it is clear that the Camry and Honda Accord are far better vehicles than the competing American products.
Soooo, I conclude by saying that Detroit has no unique factors other than having depended on the execrably bad management of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. That they had to deal with the UAW is some part of it, but that’s a management task too, and the problems go back to decades before UAW rates were the real problem.
AND that management failure is continuing bigtime today. Globalization is that macroeconomic failure. On a microeconomic basis every company is individually forced to go along with it, lest their competitor do so. But it’s a race to the bottom. Detroit in the lead.
Archaeology is replete with accounts of Lost Cities. The cities themselves are often found, sometimes in a remarkable state of integrity. The cyclopean walls, the giant towers, the awe-inspiring buildings still remain. But where have the people gone?
Somewhere else, probably. And the ruins remained because it wasn’t worth the trouble to tear them down. Implosions hadn’t been invented yet. And you couldn’t cart them off.
Since the times of hunter-gatherers, people have moved on to happier hunting grounds and to greener pastures. What made Motor City was motors. When they fell silent, not all the UAWing and all the Acorning in the world could save it.
Perhaps some cycle of rise and fall is inevitable. Industries rise and fall. Empires rise and fall. What not cities? Why not nations? The struggle to adapt is hardest where institutions are strongest. Societies become locked into their adaptations. Lawyers need cases to file to live. So they are at all events going to fight for the world as it is, so they can keep filing their cases.
Eventually the institutions collapse and then the obstacles disappear. The role of wise leadership is to find ways to let institutions adapt; or so it is said. In reality the leaders of a system are often the products of the institutions themselves. Thus their solutions are nearly always part of the problem.
It was the exodus of Smart Fraction ™ talent after the boom times of WWII.
WWII’s production surge brought in southern talent en masse: many a share cropper was lured off his plot to come to Detroit.
This warped the ratio of Smart Fraction ™ talent that had previously existed. Further, these poor guys picked up tools set down by GIs.
When the war was over, the GIs came back and found that their slots were taken — and the Blacks were not interested in plot farming anymore.
Is it any wonder that race relations went downhill fast?
Similar race fights occurred in Philadelphia: the transit workers strike in 1944 was all about Whites surrendering their job slots to Blacks. What were the not-so-talented Whites supposed to do for a living?
The same dynamic is in play today WRT illegals. Such massive, excessive talent distorts the labor market. Effectively poverty has been imported. It will persist for generations — just like the sharecropper in Detroit.
Plunging IQs correlate to plunging economic performance around the 0.93 level! ( 1.00 being perfect correlation.)
Without talent — humanity’s social glue — the edifice collapses.
It’s economic winter in Detroit and it will stay that way until Smart Fraction ™ talent finds Detroit attractive. That event is likely generations away. Everything government is doing/thwarting to Detroit is destroying any attraction.
Without government’s baleful meddling Detroit’s assets might actually attract talent. Instead, it’s becoming part of the ummah — which means that it will become a war zone — a true war zone — when the flow of insanity is reversed.
Residential real estate values are so low that Detroit – entire – could be converted to Section 8 housing and deemed a ‘Project.’
Detroit is dying because of crime. Crime imposes such financial and psychic burdens that it makes middle-class values and middle-class behaviors too expensive for the middle-class or the poor to sustain. It’s not just the bad schools, and the auto insurance rates, and the home insurance rates; pretty soon it’s burglar bars, and then your property’s worth nothing, and you don’t go outside.
A city cannot have problems of that size without a very well-placed political class engaged in continuous acts of denial. Detroit’s elite political class — black and white, but uniform in its benign views of violence and dependency — preferred to merely profit from that denial for decades.
I’ve read convincing articles that say Bing is different, and courageous, but he’s just too late. Red Harvest late.
The most fascinating sociological fact of the past sixty years in America is that our race relations–including especially urban politics–have not been grounded upon freedom. Instead of ending discrimination AGAINST race, we substituted discrimination FOR race. Instead of valuing emergence and innovation, we turned to planning and heirarchy. Instead of the openness of creativity and the facts born by intellectual curiosity, we adopted quasi-socialist ideology. Instead of objectivity, we elevated subjectivity as preferable. And most important of all, instead of self-reliance and self-improvement, we adopted victimhood as our pre-eminent urban virtue.
Are there any freedomists left in Detroit, or did the last one out already turn off the lights?
A 25% reduction? That’s astonishing! I cannot understand why it is not a 75% decrease.
Want to know why? Well, ask Michael Moore. Back in the 80′s I recall an interview with him in which he bragged about his family members who were UAW workers and “shut down those factories.”
I recall another article about a Hyundai factory going into eastern Alabama and the people were so proud to be starting up a new factory.
Lessee, where would I rather put a factory? And which kind of car would I want to buy? The place where they still brag about shutting things down or the one where they are proud to start things up?
It is said that Chicago was started when some people in New York City said “The crowding and poverty and crime are nice but let’s see if we can find a place that is colder in the winter.” I think Detroit was the result of the same thought process taking place in Chicago.
Tiger Tiger burning bright
Hall Of Fame Kaline in right
Gordy never ducked a fight
The Lions silver blue
Walter Reuther holding fast
Build them cars but not to last
Nail them owners to the mast
We take no IOU
The factories shuttered one by one
The city faced the setting sun
The people left and it was done
And now the wrecking crew
Dave Bing was once a Piston guard
He played it right he played it hard
But now he plays the final card
As Detroit sinks from view
J/5–You don’t quite have it unless you say how the person got the gold mine. Through patient prospecting and hard work? You can’t equate the qualities of temperament and personality that produce desirable outcomes (good education, nice house) with simply having the outcomes themselves.
If you see certain people with these things, you don’t modify other people’s temperament by making it easier to have those things, easier for them than for the first group. They now have something nice but they’re not different people. They’ve just had something handed to them.
Unlike Josh, I’m not skeptical of the “Reynold’s Law,” since I’ve seen it in action. Section 8 housing is a subset of this phenomenon, where public housing denizens are scattered throughout better neighborhoods partly in the hope that they would absorb the culture of work and success of their better-off neighbors. This almost never happens.
More on this: I think this is why the US is unique in many ways–we skim the cream of other societies’ people.
Scenario: foreigner A–”I’m sick of this place with the corruption and poverty. I’m going to the USA
foreigner B–”Not for me; they don’t like us, you have to do yard work and stuff like that and learn English. I’m staying here.”
A–”See you later.
Thus we get people from all over who tend to think alike, be they from Viet Nam or Mexico. I work with immigrants every week and I’m constantly amazed by how much they think like Americans. That’s because, in a very important sense, they already are.
One of the unintended effects of this de-urbanization that is afflicting not only Detroit, but other urban centers (especially in the NE) is that black political bases and power will be eroded. The saddest fact is that this would actually be a good thing, considering what black political power has wrought so far. Whatever genuine, solid economic achievements made by Americans who happen to be black have not been the result of increased black political power, but rather as a result of general economic prosperity and their own individual efforts. All black political power has brought to African Americans is corrupt politicians and ruinous social and economic policies.
Thus we get people from all over who tend to think alike, be they from Viet Nam or Mexico. I work with immigrants every week and I’m constantly amazed by how much they think like Americans. That’s because, in a very important sense, they already are.
I’ve observed the same. Many of them are what us “natives” are supposed to be but often aren’t. Just as our founding generation took English law more seriously than the home-country English did, immigrants take the American ethos more seriously than many of us native-born do.
To what extent have actions termed “investment” actually been disinvestment? Or education actually miseducation, where rather than creating problem-solving skills it created problematic attitudes.
The destruction of formerly imposing systems can’t be explained entirely by slow increase in entropy, but rather by the induced disorder of very bad decisions which accelerated precisely the wrong trends. It is tempting to characterize these bad decisions with a broad brush, but that’s too facile.
It suffices to say that things are going shabby not just with passage of time but due to the activity of a busy wrecking-crew. The question is how is society as a whole going to identify each instance of dysfunction and put it to rights?
One theory is to expect this process to be systematic. Some process will “review” policies and correct them. The other option is that Darwin will pass judgment and processes which can’t survive won’t.
That means that while Mayor Bing will do what he can, in the end it is reality which will be bulldozing. And when Detroit finally shrinks to its final size that is because that is all that it’s worth at that stage. It’s fallen to its terminal level of entropy.
One strategy for a swimmer far from shore is to use the currents when he can. That suggests that if one can’t buck the trends, you can save your efforts for the crucial battles. You simply steer your tired body back to shore. You can’t use your remaining strength to majestically crest the waves. The time for that is past. The best you can hope for is survival.
The key is to be alert to opportunity. Retreats are periods when a great chances present themselves. But you have to know what chances to take. If institutions start to collapse, we ought hope the collapse hardest hits those which house the worst ideas, the better to be free of them when the moment — if it comes — shows up.
The first thing to be rid of is the wrong dreams.
Not only are the things that make the good times unknown to a good many, they are actively discredited. See the Seattle School Board a couple of years ago when deferred gratification, or time consciousness, was considered racist. They got called on it and pulled it from their website. Doubt they decided not to believe it any longer.
“Work ethic”. A technique to enslave workers.
I figure, find the baby daddies and you’ll have the numbers you want.
Used to live nearby Detroit and worked there. Was downtown a couple of weeks ago. Sad.
But it’s exactly what the dem/lib/black coalition wanted.
v@3
Pretty much monochrome!
Good article.
I agree thought with the first poster. If one had Detroit a suburb half white and half black and half the whites left, it would collapse, if it were the other way, it wouldn’t make a difference. This is observable reality and not racism. Value systems can turn this reality around but adults cannot be babysat or told what to value.
Perhaps it is true that Detroit was a happy accident that has simply seen its better days and must give in to reality as its revenue stream silts up as did the river that doomed Ephesus.
Were I the mayor, I’d combine city property lots after homes are torn down, make park-like estates out of them but with an average sized house on it for an average price. Who wouldn’t like to live on their own little estate with trees, little gardens and ponds but in a natural state and the value would almost certainly go up in short order.
Country living right in the city. You wouldn’t need a huge population base to beautify the city and revenues would go up along with these mini-estate prices. The whole area would be less densely populated but at the same time revitalized as the kind of people who would really appreciate such a thing tend to be educated and involved in the arts.
The other unmentioned thread in the demise of the cities is decades-long one party governance; typically led by democrats. Cheers -
The Curley Effect:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/curley_effect.pdf
See Section 4.2: Coleman Young
From the Curley Effect link:
To no effect. Boston kept losing, but Curley kept winning. The Curley effect is alive and well, and it is only incidentally related to race, unless you count the Irish and the British as distinct races. A related practice is Gerrymandering, after Eldridge Gerry, also of the Bay State. It is “a practice of political corruption that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected … districts.
You fix things so you can’t lose. But this kind of rent-seeking by the incumbent works only as long as there is some design margin to feed on, some feast at Congress or the State House to attend which makes it all worthwhile. Locally it is doomed. Once the equivalent of last of the “strange and stupid race” are seen off, the Curley and Gerrymandering strategy become pointless. The locality becomes what it always aspired to be, had it the wit to realize what that really was.
To keep the gravy train chugging along, there has to be some continuous inflow of external energy to keep the Curleys of the world in clover, otherwise entropy eventually reduces things to a dead zone.
That’s why Detroit is fighting the census results. Without the missing 40,000 then Motor City wouldn’t be able to access State and Federal funds. It would lose access to the design margin and starve after picking itself clean.
Wretchard @ #6
Check out these photos of Detroit
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/detroit-decline_n_813696.html#218521
Too bad about Detroit. As a Vikings fan, I’m REALLY going to miss the buffer from the basement of the NFC North that Detroit has traditionally provided.
A subtext concerning Detroit’s poisonous race issues is the Left’s embrace of racial equality. The Left effectively owns the narrative about racial equality. Consequently it’s no surprise that this issue is badly screwed up. The Left sometimes uses its ownership of the racial equality narrative as a blunt instrument. For example, it is fashionable amongst the Left to refer to members of the Tea Party as “racist”. To a rational person, there’s nothing obviously racist about the Tea Party so through what twisted logic is the Tea Party racist? However to a moonbat it’s plainly obvious: The members of the Tea Party are mainly conservatives. Conservatives are racists. Therefore the Tea Party is racist. QED
The Left can make the claim that “Conservatives are racists” because the Left largely owns the racial equality narrative. If conservatives could capture the racial equality narrative then the Left would be stripped of a powerful political tool. I might add that Obama’s election was facilitated by the fact that he was both black and very left wing. The Left’s racial equality narrative through the help of the MSM was the engine that propelled Obama into the Whitehouse.
I believe George W. Bush understood this when he made Condoleezza Rice his Secretary of State. Generally speaking, conservatives have “dropped the ball” in terms of embracing the racial equality narrative. The Republican Party should have presented a black US Presidential candidate many years ago. I’m convinced that one of the reasons why African-Americans are mired in horrible places like Detroit is because the Left wing has served as their champions. It’s ironic that the worst enemy of African-Americans is the Left.
I’ll close by saying that one way conservatives could capture the racial equality narrative would be to get behind Bill Cosby. Conservatives should be saying “Listen to and emulate people like Bill Cosby and Condoleezza Rice”.
#20 James May
“Who wouldn’t like to live on their own little estate with trees, little gardens and ponds but in a natural state and the value would almost certainly go up in short order.”
You’d think that, James.
That’s what you’d think.
But you’d be wrong. Oh, yes, wrong.
PJ O’Rourke explored this in one of his books. It turns out that vast swaths of the urban underclass would in fact NOT want this. Hovels paid for by someone else requiring little or no investment in time or money to keep up are highly preferred to owned places that require financial diligence and continued labor – by at least a plurality of our underclass. When PJ attempted to explain the advantages of ownership to those who didn’t care for it, they just shook their heads and told him he just didn’t get it.
“So his plan is to bulldoze approximately 10,000 houses and empty buildings over the next 3 years and direct new investment into stronger neighborhoods.”
I saw that movie in the 60′s and 70′s. Lyndon called it “Urban Renewal”. Really worked at running the stable parts of the neighborhoods out leaving the not really stable. The general attitude is contemptuous of Property Rights and tends to destroy wealth. So people leave before the Govt gets to help their house.
I visited Downtown Detroit in the mid 90′s. Fascinating collection of the ruins of 1920′s Urban American Architecture at the height of its art. Lovely buildings in varying states of disrepair and deterioration. Very sad, given the level of wealth that was necessary to create them in the first place. Now probably very much worse.
There are a number of picture sites of Detroit’s degradation.
Wasn’t it Detroit where we had the famous video of people lining up to get money from “Obama’s stash” to pay their utility bills?
And I believe it is Detroit where there is a new group I saw on TV, “The Organization to Stop Utility Turn-Offs.” Just quit turning off the utilities for people who have not paid.
“Even as the waters rushed in to cover the city, the people still bellowed for their share of the stash.”
Wretchard #23:
Having lived in Boston myself, I can attest that the effects of Curley still exist. The Boston Irish are arguably the first and most expert practitioners of victim group ideology in the U.S. and served (serve?) as the blueprint for other groups, primarily African Americans. All of the things that we see in black and other victicrats – intergenerational grudges, deep bigotry towards established Americans, refusal to fully assimilate in language and customs, crafted hatred of successful Americans and the raising of envy to sacrament status, pretending that past but functionally dead prejudices against them are as alive and well today as they were 100 years ago, relexive voting for Democrats even as their standard of living and chances for success decrease, and outcome egalitarianism as a core belief – were and in many cases are still part of the core of the Boston Irish and their political outlook.
Of course, there are quite a few individuals from that community who’ve seen through this crap and have assimilated and moved on, but “Curleyism” is still very much alive and well and in full practice. There have been very successful families who broke out of this – the Flatley family, for instance – and they could have served as the role model for Boston Irish to fully assimilate and break the death symbiosis with the Democrats. Instead they chose to idolize and emulate the Kennedys, perhaps the worst example to follow.
Interestingly, large Irish enclaves in the rest of the US seem to have moved on from this toxic worldview and they are doing much better than their Boston brethren overall.
Anyone else think whoever produced Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” SuperBowl commercial will be working for the 2012 Obama campaign? The take-away from the rap-video sheen and the plaintive baritone’s quavering machismo about a city “that has been to Hell and back” seems to be: Things Have Been Done to US. Eminem only serves to emphasize that peculiar mixture of thuggishness and self-pity that Anthony Daniels analyzes so well–whether Detroit is actually making a better car these days (and if is, whether it should be done so with money we have to pay back to China)are questions that, plainly, only a **racist** would ask. No doubt Dear Leader, too, will need all our help fighting back against all these Problems He Did Not Make, though at no time will he not Bestride the World Like a Colossus.
what residents of the city deal with, including high auto and home insurance rates and corruption.
Corruption. Whether from Zimbabwe to Mexico City, from Detroit to New Orleans, from the court of the Persian kings to the halls of Congress. It matters not color, race or creed. Like murder, rape, and robbery they all will never leave man, but its practice can be suppressed and reduced to background noise. Those societies that do not tolerate and do not permit its cancer to grow are the societies that prosper. Those who look the other way or excuse its practice because it helps their tribe, invite their own hard justice.
The whole area would be less densely populated but at the same time revitalized as the kind of people who would really appreciate such a thing tend to be educated and involved in the arts.
If one doesn’t deal aggressively and comprehensively with Detroit’s criminal class, the above scenario only creates isolated outposts to be easily victimized.
g @ 12: J/5–You don’t quite have it unless you say how the person got the gold mine.
followed the crowd to California.
dr @ 13: Section 8 housing is a subset of this phenomenon, where public housing denizens are scattered throughout better neighborhoods partly in the hope that they would absorb the culture of work and success of their better-off neighbors. This almost never happens.
I’d say that’s a somewhat different case, it’s not like the idea is to send everyone to mix with college students without actually doing the work … though no doubt a cynic would say it’s pretty close.
I’d say that’s a somewhat different case, it’s not like the idea is to send everyone to mix with college students without actually doing the work … though no doubt a cynic would say it’s pretty close.
Darn Josh! You might have picked a better example!
Sending people (quota babies) to mix with college students is another sterling example of “Reynolds’ Law.”
The movement of people out of Detroit and Michigan itself has been going on for decades. Between the unions and the insane tax structure medium and small businesses had trouble surviving so they either went bankrupts, moved to right to work states, or increasingly over seas. A fair number of specialty manufacturers for the auto parts trade went that way. So a large number of the skilled trades and engineering talent left the state over the years. Now it is turning out that a fair number of domestic automakers are dependent on specialty parts from Japan. It was cheaper to pay the freight markup for the Japanese parts and supplies than to vertically integrate to get them since the small fry had died or the survivors had to charge to much for them.
One of the workers at a Tennessee foreign auto plant was interviewed years ago and said that in all honesty he had friends that just would not be able to cut it working at the plant. Their attentions spans were too short and they weren’t literate enough. In Michigan they would have required to hire them. A friend of mine worked at a specialty plant in Michigan decades ago. He was one of the last trained on an apprentice program. The government told the company they would have to hire more the minorities even if they failed the standards for the apprentice program. The company dropped the program and then a year later moved to North Carolina.
Marchand and Meffre wrote a photo book, “The Ruins of Detroit” Samples can be viewed at
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1864272_1810098,00.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2213696/slideshow/2213979/
http://flavorwire.com/139812/photo-gallery-the-ruins-of-detroit
360 panoramas
http://www.photojpl.com/themes/detroit-ruins/
A school book depository, and a police station; abandoned.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/02/the-detroit-pub.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetjuniper/sets/72157603302647339/
http://www.bulbish.com/police-precinct-station-in-highland-park-detroit-mi-abandoned-in-the-90s.html
Detroit is a lost cause. I remember an incident a few years ago when Kwame Kilpatrick was mayor. An investment group wanted to build a Convention/Events Center in Detroit. They were making their pitch to the City Council. Unfortunately, the company did not think to send an all black delegation to make the presentation. They got to the point where they were pointing out the number of good paying jobs that would be created during the construction, when the City Council [not the public, the Council Members] started screaming about how the jobs would be for white people and they did not want them. The presentation terminated rapidly. Funny thing, for some reason there is no new Convention/Events Center. And I am sure that the Detroit City Council feels that the reason is that whites are racist.
Subotai Bahadur
Now get this news item:
“Mostly black Detroit, facing diminished congressional clout after losing a quarter of its population over the past decade, likely will have to reach farther into its mostly white suburbs to keep black majorities in its two congressional districts.”
“It won’t be the first time the Motor City, which boasted three congressional districts as recently as the 1980s, has lost power in the nation’s capital. But the auto industry’s steady decline fueled a resulting population loss that’s caused the city first to lose one congressional seat, then further reduce Detroit’s dominance of its remaining two districts.”
“The two candidates elected to redrawn seats in 2012 won’t just represent Detroit, but likely areas north of Eight Mile Road, the tension-laden thoroughfare separating Detroit from its suburbs in adjoining — and largely white — Oakland and Macomb counties.”
“Because of federal laws that forbid drawing congressional lines to dilute minority voting strength, the 2000 redistricting gave Detroit’s two congressional districts a voting base that was 60 percent black, according to redistricting expert Ed Sarpolus of Target Insyght in Lansing. That was true even though the districts increasingly stretched into largely white suburbs such as Grosse Pointe and Wyandotte in Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit.”
“Even if the Detroit congressional districts reach into the northern suburbs, the percentage of black voters likely will remain about the same, Sarpolus said. To get there, the districts will have to go in search of about 300,000 more minority voters, since only about 590,000 of Detroit’s nearly 715,000 voters are black.”
So the answer they have come up with is that since Detroit no longer can have it’s “own” representative – is to expand Detroit. Those minoritoies who fled the place for the suburbs get to vote as if they were still there. How nice for them…
The collapse of Detroit started under the Roosevelt administration when the Supremes (Court that is) ruled labor unions were not monolopies. Until that time labor had been kept in check by the same anti-trust/anti-monolopy law that big business had to abide by. Within 4 yrs. from that time the unions owned the car companies with Ford being the last to surcumb. Funny how Ford is the only US car company that is not government owned and MAKING money.
Labor union corruption of politics is a huge cause of our current situation and breaking the monolopy power of unions is a key factor in getting our manufacturing base back, that and unwinding the minimum wage laws, another union idea foisted on the public. Unions, community organizers, and most politicians are simply leeches sucking the life blood out of cultures.
The making and selling of things is what leads to wealth and the symbols of wealth and as wretchard says making a cargo cult of symbols doesn’t make one wealthy.
So the answer they have come up with is that since Detroit no longer can have it’s “own” representative – is to expand Detroit. Those minoritoies who fled the place for the suburbs get to vote as if they were still there.
That sounds like Gerrymanderying pure and simple. But it passes muster by changing the “frame” — to minority representation. Gerrymanderying is bad. But change the name and it is good. Better yet, by changing the frame you make it “racist” to oppose corruption and cronyism, thus perpetuating at the outset what you wanted to fix in the first place. And voila, the very meaning of racism has been changed to become “anything that Boss Tweed doesn’t like” rather than the more commonsensical “what will hurt a group of racially similar people”.
For surely the people who must suffer most from this system are the very people enclosed by the virtual prison, in this case, African Americans. But to spring them from this trap is “racist”, which makes no sense yet which no one dare object to. That is as great a perversion of words as anything.
The solution to this problem will be to apply an even thicker layer of lies. You reframe the “frame”, just like you fight Libya with a not-really-NATO under a NATO command structure, not really using US assets because they’re relabled NATO assets. So to avoid the Gerrymanderying, it is necessary to create yet another fiction instead of confronting the problem head on. So there, “it’s fixed”. But it’s not, is it?
In time the lies pile up; the language is coarsened and scoundrels are rewarded so often they come to believe in their own virtue. This is how things fall apart. The patch is always apparently cheaper in the short run than the real fix because the real fix is punished, and is therefore never in the running. And sooner or later there is nothing but patches. One day the whole thing disintegrates. Maybe that day is now. The false economies round on the user and yet nobody will admit why.
On the Reynolds Effect:
Out of my two immediate neighbors (I live in a row), both have become Section 8 households. I was open-minded at first, but let me tell you this: I want out. Now. For the sake of my kids, if nothing else. I imagine this happens all over.
Name one city that has elected Liberal Democrats for decades that is doing well. Philadelphia? Newark? Chicago? San Francisco? Detroit and these other cities have been eating their productive people and buying the votes of slugs for decades. Billions of federal dollars have been wasted trying to “save” these cities. I don’t think any of them are worth one more dime. If they serve no economic purpose just let the cities die, and put a memorial on the highway that tells tourists this is the result of Progressive Liberals.
Here in British Columbia, all the recent candidates for the leadership of the “free enterprise” party allowed our nanny culture to cow them all into coming out in support of raising the minimum wage. When the new Premier, as her first policy decision, increased the minimum wage, and small businesses talked about laying off staff, a union chief proclaimed that nothing would be better for small business than doubling the minimum to $20 an hour because it would get everyone spending in restaurants, etc.
I sit here scratching my head wondering if it’s really possible that in this day and age our political leaders have no apparent sense that wage inflation does not create wealth, and improve the average life, but only creates inflation or costs that are passed on to consumers, while some businesses go under, in a zero sum game of declining productivity? Why wouldn’t the left see any logic in scrapping minimum wages altogether and providing some minimum income guarantees through the existing tax and welfare system? Lots of people on welfare would become employable at a dollar or two or five an hour, if this weren’t much taxed back, and this would actually lead to a growth in wealth and human dignity. Meanwhile workers with skills the market wants could still command decent wages. And low-skilled workers would benefit, in the job/wage market, from decreasing unemployment. Of course there would be problems figuring out the ground where subsidized and non-subsidized wages would meet, but is it an impossible problem? Is the left really conscious that it wants to build a relatively impoverished neo-feudalism of non-productive rent seekers, or do we just widely lack the minimal economic sense to know that increasing nominal wages does nothing to increase real wealth?
truepeers, you ask do the leaders know they’re being intentionally destructive? I have to say yes, many of them do. And many of their opponents simply believe they’re misguided, that they realize not what they do. Surely no rational leader would intentionally do harm, right? We like to think they have good intentions but that they are simply misguided. The benefit of doubt among citizens of a right and proper civil society!
But things like the Curley Effect and the Cloward-Piven strategy belie all that. The animus behind these two strategies is to inflict harm knowingly in pursuit of personal political power. To see if Leftist leaders are consciously aware of these things, refer to the link buddy larsen gave yesterday, it’s an eyepopper:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/revealed-the-lefts-economic-terrorism-playbook-the-chase-campaign-for-a-coalition-of-unions-community-groups-lawmakers-and-students-to-take-down-us-capitalism-and-redistribute-wealth-power/
This is treason. This is a smoking gun. There is no other way to describe it. It is akin to being in on that old SDS meeting in the 60′s where Ayers & Co. speculated how many would have to be killed after power was obtained, to solidify things. Here they are, in flagrante delicto, discussing plans to bring down the American economy, Cloward-Piven style (with a citation), in order to re-fashion it along their liking.
Wretchard #40:
Until I read that item I pasted in my comment I had no idea that “federal laws forbid drawing congressional lines to dilute minority voting strength.”
I always figured that such gerrymandering was a local deal. “Support my bid for governor and I’ll see to it that you get a nice district.” But it seems that “federal laws” require it.
Note that the minorities that live in the Detroit suburbs may not embrace the personal philosophies of the inner city – in fact you can be pretty sure they do not or else they would not have left. But you can bet that there will not be enough blacks that have their heads screwed on straight in that tortureously drawn district to prevent the usual race pimp crooks from being chosen as the candidates to run. So it will be a case of voting for the crook that has the same color skin as you do or voting for the somewhat less objectionable Republican candidate that will not get elected anyway, or not voting at all. Nice deal.
The Republicans have taken over the leadership in a number of the old rust belt states, and as the furor in Wisconsion shows, some people are mighty upset over it. But one wonders how much of that situation is due to widespread disgust with the older leadership and how much is their traditional constituants simply failing to show up to Win the Future.
Detroit got better and better every day, until it disappeared entirely.
The ‘fabulous ruins of Detroit pictures” here:
http://detroityes.com/home.htm
When I was a kid my mother used to take me to downtown Detroit. The streets were so crowded that you were in danger of being pushed into the street. On a weekend. Now Detroit looks like Berlin after the war.
With respect to Detroit’s current condition, I often wonder if that is not the fate of the US. It not difficult to find those all over the country who come for the goods, not the things that created the goods and in the process trying very hard to create the mess they left.
Not say they are mean or nasty, they just do not know any better and no one teaches them. In fact it is probably illegal to do so.
You know, Cowboy, when I saw that clip on Beck last night what interested me most was when he said something like, “the unions are dead, and the community organizations are dead . . . so that’s why we have to try this lame-ass act of desperation . . .” I thought it was good news. If the unions and community organizers are dead we’ll all be a lot better off.
And I’d be surprised if the outcome of their grand scheme is any different from when a bunch of those idiots blew themselves up back in the 60′s. (not that it’s not treason)
As for Detroit, wealth doesn’t come from things. Only matter can come from matter. Wealth implies goodness, which implies the existence of absolute goodness. So that means wealth comes from God. The reason Ford created wealth was that he either believed that or he believed in America, which is indirectly the same thing. Too many of the people of Detroit must have lost that somewhere along the way.
I know a near-hundred year-old black lady who lives in Southeast DC, not exactly a posh area. These days she spends mostly in prayer, but her little neighborhood is neat as a pin. Years ago she told the story of when a drug house moved in. All the people in the neighborhood prayed until they left.
It’s not rocket science: call evil by its name and it shrinks away. That’s how the Three Musketeers collapsed the USSR. But to do that you have to know the difference between good and evil, which again requires an awareness and understanding of God.
W – “That is as great a perversion of words as anything.”
No, the greatest perversion is the notion that black people are incapable of racism. This is the key to the cognitive dissonance and the lie that keeps victimhood going for profit. But it goes deeper than profit, 9 out of ten of my African American friends, educated every one of them, believe that George W. Bush was directly responsible for 9/11. Those tirades by Louis Farrakhan or Jeremiah Wright are not mere outliers. They speak to a fundamental pathology of inspired hatred for all things brotherly and communal.
And the worst of if is not dividing the remains of Carthage to political lines but how the US government has abdicated the notion of our founding principles as enshrined by the bill of rights and have Gerrymandered the minds, yea the souls of the voting public by giving sustenance to the great lie. The victims will never prosper and the need for the services of their nanny will never expire.
Democrats have had their hand at building their motor city. At some point we must stand back and judge them for their successes and failures and decide if we want to take their solutions into the future of other cities.
After reading of the “Curley Effect” and what Coleman Young did for five terms in Detroit it strikes me Obama is doing the same thing now in DC. Today Detroit, tomorrow the US. God save us all.
Katie @ 24 — The saying is true, a picture is worth a thousand words. But those pictures say more than a thousand words could ever say. They should rename the city Detroilet!
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But home ownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
Do not expect any Marxist argument to be based on reason and truth. The Middle Class cannot be increased by robbing the Middle Class and redistributing its property to the subsidized Proletariat Class – that is the Marxist formula, foreseen and intended beforehand, for economic destruction of the Middle Class.
“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… The proletariat [lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled under-achievers] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class and entrepreneurs], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Karl Marx understood that a prosperous democracy can be perverted into serfdom under totalitarian government – no doubt Marx understood it would be much more difficult to subvert a Constitutional Republic – where there might be limits on government collectivization – limits on taxation. Subversion of a democracy occurs when enough of a population goes over to the proletariat class – with outstretched hands – voting for the Party which will rob the laboring middle class on their behalf. Eventually under Marxism the middle class is worn down – exhausted and demoralized by what amounts to slave labor. When the middle class finally succumbs there will be a dramatic fall off in production of food and other goods and services – anarchy ensues – and who “comes to the rescue” but the Marxist Ruling Class who robbed the middle class workers to buy the votes of the lazy proletariat class in the first place. Envision a cruise ship where more and more passengers run over to the left side looking for “free stuff” from government – of course the “free stuff” is the fruit of other men’s labor – the laboring middle class men still slogging it out on the right side. Eventually there will not be enough laborers and entrepreneurs on the right side of the ship to prevent it from capsizing. Voila: Social Justice ends in poverty and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – code for dictatorship of the Marxist ruling class. Karl Marx termed victory of the Marxist ruling class (and the lazy proletariat class) over the laboring middle class as “winning the battle of democracy.”
“We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Economic justice is the equal, unalienable, God-given right of each individual to his/her labored-for property in pursuit of happiness – not Marxist equal outcome of property (including home ownership). Equal outcome of property is an Orwellian lie – an Orwellian contradiction – the defining Contradiction of Marxism – because economic equality requires an excessive and therefore unnatural use of force. Excessive force requires a superior class of not-to-be-equalized equalizers – a force-wielding class superior in rights – superior before law – and superior themselves in social and economic (property) outcome. Equal rights of every man and woman to the fruit of their own labor (free enterprise) leads to economic inequality – which is natural and un-forced. Marxism, in Orwellian fashion, leads to even greater economic inequality – which is unnatural since it requires great force via gun-clinging government agents, courts and prisons. The only government regulation required to ensure the economic justice of truly free enterprise is just that amount of force needed to ensure equality of rights to life, liberty and the fruit of labor – a minimum of force.
“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” Thomas Jefferson
Free people are naturally prosperous because they bring home the fruit of their own labor, and thereby possess a natural incentive to labor. An unnatural state of serfdom and poverty occurs when Marxist government (a small group of people) forcefully robs and then “collectivizes” the fruit of other people’s labor – in violation of Natural Law. The temptation to pig out on collectivized property and to use it for bribing people and buying votes is an irresistible force in Marxist government. Serfdom and poverty are inevitable in a collectivist society because the people comprising collectivist (excessively taxing) government are greedy for fruit of other men’s labor – and because the work ethic of the laboring middle class is destroyed as they eventually become exhausted and demoralized by the burden of excessive taxation of their labor on behalf of the proletariat and Marxist ruling classes. The work ethic of the non-disabled proletariat class is also destroyed because they are no longer required to labor for property – the Marxist ruling class supplies them with the fruit of middle class labor. In the end a nation where the natural work ethic of its people is destroyed is a nation on the road to serfdom and poverty. Marxist Socialism is not the cure for poverty – it is one of the chief causes of poverty in the modern world – an organized crime against humanity.
Black Run America in action.
Apparently not even middle class black people want to live around black people. Detroit was destroyed by a combination political corruption, black crime, black crime, and more black crime. And totally dysfunctional schools, where nobody learns anything, and surprise, there is lots of crime.
Sorry to be so politically incorrect.
A big question is, is there a point of no return? A point where a city just no longer functions and nothing can bring it back? Detroit might be the first such city in the USA, but will it be the last?
Is the United States destined to become a giant third-world refugee camp?
vanderleun @ 3:
Interesting documentary, but what strikes me is that the old bldgs have basically become artists’ communes. IOW the artists/arteestes move there because the bldgs are spacious and cheap. So they can play at their art. But playing at art is not manufacturing useful stuff, is not learning how to build and run a sewer system or an electrical grid, is not learning how to build those same buildings to begin with. These young arteeste dabblers just come across as modern-day hippies. I’m sure many of them are “nice kids” but … come on … you can’t be doing that stuff when you’re 40 (okay, I guess you could, but try getting a date if you’re still doing that stuff at 40).
Nice people. Just not serious people. It takes serious people to build a civilization.
And please note the tone of youthful arrogance and disdain in the young man who is JKnox’s guide when, in the very beginning of the video, he describes the different attitudes of the suburban parents and the suburban youngster arteestes. The eye-rolling of snotty youth who are convinced of their superior wisdom over their so-NOT-cool parents hasn’t changed much since Elvis, has it?
****************
Re: Pittsburgh, puh-leeze, Wretchard, do not lump us in with Detroit, Cinci or Cleveland. One could write a monograph on the schizophrenic traits of this town, traits which make it simultaneously both a great place to live and maddeningly stuck in outmoded political dysfunctions. Please also keep in mind that when one reads stats about “Pittsburgh” (esp. the population loss) what one is reading are almost always stats about the CITY OF PITTSBURGH. A specific governmental & geographic entity. The C of P is broke. The C of P’s fire and police pensions are underwater. The C of P has not elected a Republican mayor since 1933. The C of P has crazy-high taxes. The C of P’s public schools (Pgh Public SD) have shameful test scores and graduation rates. And, yah, great swaths of Downtown Pgh turn into emptyville on nights & weekends. (Don’t EVEN get me started on the parking insanity … 125,000 downtown workers and only 14,000 parking spaces … and they spend half a billion on a big hole under the Allegheny River just so’s the old ladies at the Casino won’t have to take a $&*(%! shuttle across one of the FOUR bridges we have spanning that same river!)
And yet. There is a TON of life here. Housing prices are sane & stable. Outside the C of P, though you frequently have to leave Allegheny County as well, you can find fiscally responsible governance models. Social conservatives abound. But the #1 millstone around our neck IMO is union legacy voting. It is literally impossible to win elected office as a Republican in many places, which are de facto one-party systems … so conservative ideas re: governance & taxation do not get nearly as wide a hearing as they would in a genuine two-party system.
Those “bitter clingers” of Pennsyltucky that Obama spoke about? They are all over Southwestern PA. Many work in the C of P every day, having traveled in from the suburbs and exurbs.
In sum, Pittsburgh is NOT a “dying city,” as a lot of people not familiar with this area frequently infer from reading statistics about population trends & financial stats. Broke and dysfunctional? Yup, the C of P is all that. And yet here we are, still standing. For some reason the Lord seems to keep smiling on us. SB XLV notwithstanding. But maybe Hines will bring home the Mirror Ball Trophy instead.
Join the UAW
the Genie’ll rub ya
follow Pa and Grandpa to the shop!
Then follow your leaders
as management teeters
and your son and grandson get the chop!
“Detroit might be the first such city in the USA,”
Nah! Memphis is ahead of you. They have just released their school Charter and Expect the County to take over the City schools ( about the worst in the nation).
Now there is talk about Letting the police and fire departments go too.
At some point the city will go, becoming part of the county.
The city employees are upset as ‘ell. They figured a county takeover would just means a different name on the paycheck. They were wrong. It means no paycheck.
Cowboy, 44
Well, you’re right, some of them still think like old-style Marxists who think something good will arise from acts of destruction. But how many on the left really believe that still? How many really believe in the magical thinking that if we double the minimum wage there will be double the wealth to go around? Those tapes you link show the anarchist guy saying, they (Wall St.) lie to us, we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money around. Well, he’s right there’s plenty of money around; but it’s worth less and less every day, and the money is not being used productively for various reasons. Some people can surely see that. I am not totally unsympathetic to the idea that a lot of banks should be bankrupt and that there is a Wall St/Washington cronyism that has done harm to America, that there have been huge amounts of theft under the guise of high finance. It’s just that those union people understand the situation from a perspective that is delusional on many other levels. They don’t see that they too are part of the problem. So I’d say they are both delusional and intentionally destructive.
bogie wheel #55
For some reason the Lord seems to keep smiling on us. SB XLV notwithstanding.
So when are the Bucs going to win the WS?
I look at the Detroit photos and I read this thread and its comments and I can’t help thinking that this has all been forecast in fiction, in Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany.
The prototype for the implosion of Detroit was Gary Indiana. Here are some numbers from the Wiki chronicling the decline from the peak around 1960.
Year Population % change from prior
1970 175,415 −1.6%
1980 144,953 −17.4%
1990 116,646 −19.5%
2000 102,746 −11.9%
2010 80,294 −21.9%
What happened to 100,000 people? They left town as the dogs of corruption, violence, racial politics, and deindustrialization chased each other in circles. The motto of Gary that graced the sign at the city border said “City on the Move” so a wag attached one to it that read “Will the last one to move please turn out the lights?”
The missing people were Steelworkers. The UAW is a sophisticated metrosexual set of dilletanttes compared to the United Steel Workers union. They remain unregenrate and devoted to confrontational Marxist doctrinaire posturing that seemed anachronistic in the 1950s. These were the guys that Harry Truman and the Democrats considered a security risk. These were the guys that George Meany tried to wrestle into supporting a pro-American image for unionism. While they were romanticized in the Deer Hunter the generations of East European proletarian heroes proved to intractable to embrace the discipline of true Communism. Many of them in the 1970s and ’80s retired to Poland to enjoy favorable exchange rates on their pensions and Social Security. Once their they displayed the same spirit of irascibility so effectively that they helped to inspire the Solidarity Movement.
The Black population that came later may have arrived as the old model was already failing. The pathologies that afflict the current dwindling and unemployed Black populations of Gary and Detroit may be seen as rooted in their communities and a contribution to the interrelated conditions, political, educational, safety, and commercial that impede regeneration but there might be another way to view this. It is possible to argue that those conditions were to some extent set in motion by the largely White prior population who profited and then departed from the desert they helped to make. The children of the steel and auto workers of the 1940s through the ’60s largely moved on and up in America. Some of those who immigrated to the industrial Northern cities from foreign countries such as rural Mississippi have found it harder to escape.
Unless I missed it in the comments, no-one has mentioned the 60′s Detroit riots, in which the good citizens of Detroit burned down the city. Productive, and/or caucasians don’t have to be very astute to recognize this as a subtle signal to get themselves, their families, and anyone they cared about, the hell out of Detroit. They got what they wanted when they drove those they referred to as “honkeys” out. Detroit still may not think that was a mistake, as long as the tax money keeps pouring in from elsewhere (the stash) to maintain some level of subsidized squalor.
Don’t forget St. Louis which has been trying to emulate Detroit for decades. Massive corruption, insane union power and destructive work rules. A strong organized crime presence. Democrat-ruled in perpetuity. African American concentration. INCREDIBLY poor schools (but I repeat myself, having noted the union and organized crime strength…)
But the city of St. Louis is politically distinct from St. Louis County and other surrounding counties, which are Republican. Federal court-enforced school bussing into the near suburbs from the city drove productive people who cared about their children’s education even farther from the city. Employers abandoned the city and moved to the surrounding counties where their productive employees live (and vice versa). So the greater St. Louis area has survived, and even thrived, except for the somewhat-confined cancer of the city in the middle. Now that forced bussing is ending, even the suburbs closest to St. Louis city will strengthen again.
Michigan has had no such areas of productive voter control against corruption and Democrat-machine union destructiveness. Three was no place to go. There was no place to have a productive business without union shakedowns. The entire state has been rock-solid Democrat for many years (until the last election). So instead of moving to the suburbs, productive businesses that still could, left the state of Michigan.
What would it take to get productive employers and productive people to recolonize (an accurate but not PC word) Detroit? Its not possible without extreme political change over a long time period. It won’t happen because the damage is so enormous.
*42, San Francisco, despite being moonbat central, is actually a doing quite well. In the bay area unions only represent city workers. The vast army of high tech private businesses ie. Intel, Google, Facebook, all have kept unions out by competing for a very well educated class of worker. One problem is that it is a devils compact. They all agree global worming is a fact, gay rights & antiwar and let the unions run city government as long as they don’t try to go after businesses. With the rapid changes, any business that tried a union would go out of business. The democrats tend to have a pro business faction, and prop 13 sets up an incentive for cities to encourage business development. For example, the new Lt. Gov. was both pro gay and pro business in San Francisco, as its mayor.
A major factor is that the two largest cities, San Jose and San Francisco have a very few black residents, the black population is centered in the East Bay, in Oakland and Richmond. The south Bay AKA “Silicon Valley” is about one third Asian, one third White, and one third Mexican.
An interesting factor keeping the number of foreclosures down was the difficulty of building anything with all the environmental hoops. The limited supply of housing has kept prices up. In outlying areas where they built more there are more problems, but nothing like LA, or Nevada.
We have to remember that cities start and grow for economic reasons and can and do die for economic reasons.
Gary, Indiana was the creation of United States Steel. Take away the steel industry and its employment and why have a Gary, Indiana, other than interia? Detroit, Michigan as an industrial center was largely the creation of Henry Ford.
Parasites and predators are the curse of all living things – including human societies. Keeping ourselves with a minimum burden of such is our duty to ourselves and our children. Can we isolate these pest holes and inoculate our healthy parts against them? That’s the responsibility of the American citizen and of all members of Western Civilization.
A couple of points from someone who lives in SE Michigan:
On the missing 40,000: Mayor Bing is trying to get every dollar he can to narrow the gap in a bankrupt budget. That entails playing all options for revenue capture. Bing ran an automotive supplier company for many years. He’s a businessman –not a politician. I met him years ago at an auto conference and I think he’s an okay guy. He hasn’t done anything as mayor to cause me to revise my opinion.
SE Michigan has one of the most dynamic entrepreneurial enironments in the US. There are four incubators (TechTown in Detroit, SPARK in Ann Arbor, Oakland University-Macomb, and Automation Alley in Oakland Co.) The ammount of innovation is incredibly high and conyinues the historical roots of the region in developing new products and technologies. The human capital is pretty impressive and a significant ammount of energy is directed at core problems. I wouldn’t be too quick to be writing obituaries.
There are a lot of people thinking, planning, and acting on “re-inventing” Detroit. It doesn’t get much press, so you might be forgiven for thinking we’re stuck in the old model. I don’t believe the re-invention is going to look anything like another iteration of the automobile industry (or any other heavy industrysolution). Detroit has a LOT of space–139 sq miles (by comparison, Boston and San Francisco are each about 45 sq miles). A lot of the land is vacant, abandonded, or under populated. The most likely direction is going to be intensive urban agriculture. It addresses problems like nutrition, effective land use, employment (when scaled up). Look for new value streams arising from this. They will be sustainable on their own and not be a bunch of activist science projects.
Jaybird #63:
A friend of mine was a firefighter in Detroit in the 60′s, coming back there after he fought in WWII to join the fire dept. He said that during the riots they had tanks – army tanks – with loaded main guns – escorting the fire trucks. And the fire dept was kept in an armed, fenced, guarded compound.
As for St. Louis I just saw where the population has decreased by 8% since the last census. What can you expect of a place where they elect dead people. Even in Chicago they only let dead people vote; they don’t elect them.
JCD: Good luck, really, but when I hear about programs like “urban agriculture” I see federal tax dollars, and then failure, and the money folded neatly in politicians’ pockets. Nutrition? Who’s going to do the work, those people who can’t be bothered to feed their own kids? The people five generations into utter government dependence, whose grandmothers and mothers never held a job, who would have Al Sharpton screaming from the rooftops if someone tried to suggest they grow things for a living?
You can’t get the chronic dependency class to work. They don’t know how. It’s that bad, and nobody does them any favors by sugar-coating this or pretending they don’t exist, in stubborn numbers. I worked in social services and politics in Atlanta for twenty years, for a half-dozen nonprofits and the feds along the way, and I never saw a jobs program for adults that wasn’t an utter scam, or a federal redevelopment program that did anything but line certain people’s pockets while shifting the poor from one county to another. I’m talking billions of dollars, and also surprisingly tiny sums, all systematically squandered, and improvement in the general welfare of the underclass occurred only in spite of the vast bureaucracy of poverty pimping in its multiple forms.
Energetic, educated people move in, apply themselves to making things better, and that helps here and there, except in places that it doesn’t. It takes a certain masochistic mindset to tolerate conditions like that for too long, and eventually people burn out or go away because they’re sick of wasting energy and quietly shocked to discover that entrenched social dysfunction isn’t just some conservative chimera.
Cities like this have long been expensive playgrounds for hipsters, so long as the federal money keeps rolling in. I recently met a woman involved in “green-space acquisition” in Atlanta, and she kept talking about how “she” was buying up tracts of land and turning them into parks. She said it wasn’t costing city taxpayers “anything except her salary” because it was private grants and “federal money”: I was trying to be civil so I didn’t bother to state the obvious.
Turned out that wasn’t true, either, about city or state taxes. And what was “she” building? She said it was going to look like the National Mall. A little simulacrum of the federal government, paid for by other people, the same people who will keep on subsidizing the lifestyles of the former housing project residents who were dispersed to other places to make room for the park.
re: bell cureve: Apparently not even middle class black people want to live around black people.
I see it less of a race issue and more of an IQ issue. Not a lot of blacks in my town, and although it’s a smaller city the troublesome elements are tyically clustered together. Their offspring are consistent underperformers in schools. They fail at simple rituals, such as personal hygiene. The police spend most of their time interacting in these clustered neighborhoods. Makes me speculate that a K-T boundary of sorts can be found when comparing IQ’s.
To build on this further… Ayers might have found a pulse with his die off theory, he just didn’t apply it correctly. How long before the 40% of non swimmers who don’t pay taxes drag the rest beneath the waves? Cut the rope and let the part that Darwin got right work as it should… i.e. end the giveaways, care for the sick and lame and starve out the lazy.
Nature vs Nurture, the ageless question. I gotta go with nurture. A way to explain this to kids is, tell them to visualize two pie charts, both marked per any race. Bisect each with the average IQ line. Assign the line the proper number, on both charts. Note how much of the lower numbered pie’s two halves would also be in the higher numbered pie’s two halves. The difference between the two lines is not going to be very much of the pie.
(what happened to edit feature? Long gone)
Anyhoo, either half of any race is gonna be smarter or dumber than just a wee bit less or more than the corresponding half of any other race. This hardly accounts for the dysfunctional permanent underclass (which could be called ‘underculture’ in the economic frame) that every civilization seems to have, so the cause of the dysfunction has got to be something in the culture. In the case of USA, the overculture, through the entire culture’s youth cohort’s entertainment industry, celebrates the very attitude that subverts the underculture’s entry –necessarily launched young or not at all –into the stream of upward mobility.
This dynamic proceeds a few decades, and it becomes set in the stone of expectations, wherein the reversion to the mean is the expectation further subverting any outbreak, making the required effort by definition extraordinary.
If in hopeless-seeming situations one decides to not give up hope, then the ancient advice seems to be “go to First Principles, and then stay there, and see what virtuous cycle may start up in time”.
IOW, take the long road –it’s the only one. And every journey, regardless of length, must begin with a first step.
Fertile ground for Madison Avenue –if it gave a shit.
Kids need resistance to the entertainment industry but damned if i can see the way there. maybe, y’know, H-Bombs or something.
It’s a pity we can’t make the self-funding and sustaining unit of government the congressional district (better yet, half the size of today’s district – something closer to the size of a Swiss Canton – they are responsible for funding and managing most everything local, incl. health care, etc.). Today our gerrymandered-or-not districts are larger than any state within 20 years of the founding. The fact that they’ve been drawn to reflect a political bias and social view could be turned into a good thing – there will be fewer arguments when starting out about “how things ought to be.” And without Other People’s Money reality will set in quickly. Who knows, the left-leaning might even learn they have to bid for the affection of the job-maker, wealth-creator class (aka “the rich.”) (v. calling them evil, sending protesters to their homes).
All these issues will quickly sort themselves out once a (political) decision is closely coupled with consequence and the citizens remain free to vote with their feet – and rather than having to move to Texas and its like-minded kin, across town will be enough to surface what works and not – without dictating from on high – save “you’re on your own, we have no money, so any promises we made are now actually the promises you made to your own neighbors, we’re sorry but you have to go work it out, and good luck.”. Who knows, maybe some communities will thrive under a more communitarian system… and those so minded will have the opportunity to find out (but not with other communities’ dimes).
The most likely direction is going to be intensive urban agriculture. It addresses problems like nutrition, effective land use, employment (when scaled up). Look for new value streams arising from this. They will be sustainable on their own and not be a bunch of activist science projects.
I don’t think that’s likely. You don’t have an agriculture culture in Detroit; you’d have to import people with that mindset, and then protect them from the depredations of Detroit’s worst denizens. Detroit started out as a fort, and entire Detroit neighborhoods would have to be turned into secure, gated communities to incubate them so they have any chance of thriving.
A strong organized crime presence. Democrat-ruled in perpetuity. (St. Louis)
I believe there is a strong connection between the two phenomena. I think it’s worth a research study. If the connection is proven, and is shown to be a frequent and persistent pattern, it can be used against Democrats and their allies. I am talking about nationwide, not just St. Louis.
W – brilliant essay.
FWIW – I will distribute it to my email list.
I took a refresher CPR course last night. The instructor (great instructor) talked about average survival rates for people who’s hearts stop in various cities around the US. For the vast majority of US cities, the survival rate is between 7 nd 17%. Seattle is the highest at 60%, likely because the city has a huge rate of citizen training in CRP. Detroit was the lowest.
The survival rate for people who’s heart stops in Detriot is effectively 0%. Zero. Don’t have a heart attack in Detroit.
It’s a cultural marker. Seattle has it’s own idiocies (hello Congressman McDermot, hello King County Elections Office…) but there’s still a good combination of self-reliance and community spirit. People in Seattle make an effort to improve themselves so that they can be more useful to the community. They get screwed up on priorities, but there’s a sense of responsibility that seems to be totally lacking in Detroit.
#67 RWE
According to Wikipedia, “the continued migration of white Americans since 1950, caused the city [St. Louis ]to lose people at a rate faster than any other major American city, losing more than half its population: in 1950, it had a population of 856,796; in 2010, the population was 319,294″ – St. Louis is now smaller than Kansas City, but with almost 3 million population in the surrounding counties.
Having grown up in St. Louis, and subsequently living in Chicago, I reflected on your observation that in Chicago dead people can vote, but in St. Louis they can be elected to office. I think it is better to elect dead people to office, than having them voting. Their retirement, travel and entertainment costs to the taxpayers are much less, and it is much harder to bribe them.
With Buddy Larsen, I think the kids in the inner city could do well if they had a decent education and productive culture. Imagine yourself with kids you care about in Detroit, St. Louis or Gary, knowing they are doomed by gang culture and corrupt and incompetent school systems with union teachers of the type we see marching in protest. That alone would be so depressing
Thank you again Mr. Fernandez for your acute and informative insight into the current dysfunction the left is inflicting upon the USA. Also thank you for noting Reynold’s Law. I’ve been looking for a term to define the construct.
After reading this piece, I recalled a quote from Ted Kennedy that defines the dysfunctional thought processes involved to come to such faulty conclusions and actions:
“I do not believe what I see, I see what I believe.”
That is the very definition of being a certifiable crazy ass loony toon.
Kennedy, talking of beauty that takes the breath away, in breath that took the beauty away.
“I do not believe what I see, I see what I believe.”
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident… I tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else; not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” George Orwell – 1984
If purely by blind luck, obviously, a few reptilian-level Teaparty racists can manage to ‘out’ the rare traces of bigotry which had apparently almost miraculously eluded the “layers and layers” of peer selection and review processes which insure the objectivity of National and local small community NPR reportage, then surely NPR can ‘out’ the vile Teaparty racists running Detroit!
Then, it’ll be on to St. Louis, New Orleans, Oakland Ca., and Washington, D.C., just to name a few of the Teapartiers’ Bitter-Clinger outposts comprising their network of small hamlets!
An anecdote that is in line with Wretchard’s theme of Reynold’s Law and mistaking the material symbol for the spiritual value it represents: I’ve gotten an oral history from a man raised and educated in St. Louis and Ohio. He studied under german rocket scientists who emigrated after WWII. Worked at Wright Patterson when certain people were known by the school they attended (teachers they learned from) and were given deference in making project decisions. It was a golden age that he feels has closed. He was taught how to solve problems, and called it a hard learning process. He describes today’s engineers as highly credentialed, not as a compliment. He may have used another term.
In the mid 80′s he was in a hiring position with a company that among other things built engines for the space shuttle. The government mandated that a certain number of women and minorities be hired. No matter how wide the net was cast he couldn’t find a qualified candidate. So the positions went unfilled or in some departments less qualified people were hired.
I’m not as intelligent but I’ve been lucky to have had his influence in my life.
erico 82: “The [Federal] government mandated that a certain number of women and minorities be hired.”
Affirmative Action is a form of Cultural Marxism. When individuals prepare themselves through laborious study for a problem-solving position in industry (or for acceptance in graduate school), and are passed over by Federal Law in favor of those based on class status (race or sex) rather than skill and academic qualification; then the victim irrationally possesses a lesser right to the pursuit of happiness and those chosen irrationally possess a higher right to the pursuit of happiness. A nation conceived in Liberty is one of equal rights, whereas a nation based on equal outcome is Marxist because equal outcome requires unequal rights – destruction of rights to the pursuit of happiness for some – enhancement of rights to the pursuit of happiness for others – based on class status (race or sex). Additionally “equal outcome” is an Orwellian contradiction – an oxymoron – the defining Contradiction of Marxism – because equal outcome requires an excessive and therefore unnatural use of force. Excessive force requires a superior class of not-to-be-equalized equalizers – the social engineers – a class of people (the Marxists) who, by forcefully wielding their equalizing power, end up themselves superior in outcome – unequal outcome – an Orwellian contradiction – like the Pigs of Animal Farm they themselves end up “more equal than others.” Equal outcome does not occur naturally, whereas unequal outcome occurs naturally without force because some study harder than others and some are blessed with higher IQ.
“Both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions [or jobs in industry]. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.” Bill Lind
http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/
“The proletariat [the under-achievers] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property, positions in graduate school, jobs in industry] from the bourgeoisie [hard-studying and laboring middle class], to centralize all instruments of production [and graduate school positions, and jobs in industry] in the hands of the state [Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property [and rights to graduate school admission, and rights to jobs in industry]. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property [and this middle class applicant to graduate school, and this middle class applicant for industrial jobs]. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
off topic – please forgive me – but i wanted to reply to
55. marymcl from the Mysteries thread –
yes – we live up in the northern Appalachian range – and cut firewood for our income – and care for these woods and their inhabitants – it is not much different than taking care of a garden – just a much larger scale –
we have large ground ant nests – – and wasps that have built nests on our house eves – and many birds that nest in our house beams, and woods – animals of all kinds – - and rodents of many kind – perhaps too many – but that is their life – we all get along well enough — stuff happens – to them and to us –
I have been stung – and while snoozing in my comfy chair one day recently woke up to find a shrew attempting to chew on my toe – we get chipmunks running through the house in summer – and beavers in our garden –
it’s all a dance isn’t it? – the Mysteries of nature – The Field of Dreams
PA Cat @ 60:
So when are the Bucs going to win the WS?
I think I can confidently predict that the Tampa Bay Bucs will win the World Series long before the Pittsburgh Pirates ever do so again.
Roberto weeps. Or is laughing his head off. I can’t figure out which.
Curse of Barry Bonds!!!!
Their has always been one huge X-factor when discussing Detroit and it’s slow metamorphosis into inconsequence.
That is Islam, and it’s adherents.
The 1930′s Detroit had the nascent awakening of the Black Muslim movement and the coming out of the “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad”. Then following this, regrettably I’m unfamiliar with the why’s and wherefores, tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and North African Muslims and in addition many Christians from that region referred too as the Near East Levant, immigrated into the Southeastern Michigan community.
Residing there in the early !980′s up to 1985. I felt immediately the palpable tension between the Super majority Black community and the largely dominant local grocery store owning community made up of mostly Middle Eastern men. Emphasis on men. Large families. Brothers sisters Mom’s Pop’s cousins uncles and aunts running stores that fed and often created a mix of emotions in a Black community that was at sea. A majority of Black men unemployed. Black teenagers super-unemployed and/or unemployable. The traditional grocery stores such as A&P and Kroger’s had left inner city Detroit and the Palestinians and so many other of their brethren from that region of the world took the ball and ran with it.
I’ve always been curious how all this worked itself out considering how terribly Detroit and the lot of all who stayed had too suffer through “the fall”. I take it they have migrated out, all one and the same fate.
Another fascinating aspect relating too Detroit and Islam are how thousand upon thousands of Detroit, S.E. Michigan young black men and women who were and are converted to Islam through the prison clerics and the peer to peer proselytizing. Detroit is because of this undoubtedly one of the most dangerous petri dishes of dysfunction that America has ever bred.
What one day will metamorphosis from this tragedy will incorporate the anger that made up John Browns raid at Harpers Ferry Virginia and finally regrettably evolve into a million Hiroshimas. One adherent at a time. Excuse my pessimism.
Re the Curley Effect I’m amazed no one has brought up a long time Detroit mayor named Coleman Young, assuming I didn’t just miss it.
He was openly racist and despised the suburbs and their white inhabitants. I’ve read that when he became mayor he essentially destroyed the Detroit police department because in his view it arrested too many black people. Not good, if you want people to live in your city.
So give him a big helping of credit for all the fascinating ruins that were once a great industrial city. Yes, I know the 1967 riots were a huge factor. Living near Detroit I’m amazed at how much talk I’ve heard about them over the years.
But give Coleman Young his due. He took a big city with typical big city problems and helped turn it into an international symbol of ruin, decay and collapse.
A real man of genius, Coleman was.
Great stuff here Richard. I always find some truly unique and well expressed insights here. It would be nice to see it taken one step further, though. Is capitalism doomed by the treachery of its own spoiled, deluded children? Does capitalism inevitably produce the means of its own destruction? Is there any way to break the cycle?