Disaster capitalism killed Detroit

[JWBooth]

Detroit has to many blacks

Thank heavens somebody introduced an intellectual point of view into this thread, it was getting sooooo mundane.

 

[editec]

There are ten thousand fathers to the disaster than is the American Auto industry.

You can start with history.

Post WWII who was around that COULD make auto?

Of course the BIG THREE dominated the world

And then that changed.

And then we elected to allow more and more foreign cars in, in order to help out our NON COMMIE allies..

the world changed and neither management nor labor nor the government had the sense (or perhaps the power) to change behaviors in order to respond to that change.


ASs to Detroit's problems?

WHITE FLIGHT...anybody remember the term?

WEll it wasn't that much of a problem UNTIL the auto industry strated laying off and then guess what?

All those formerly well paid citizens of detroit no longer had enough dough to keep that city viable.

We see similar cases all over the former INDUSTRIAL BELT of the northeast and midwest.

 

[Truthseeker420]

Detroit is an example of what happens in single industry towns when detrimental changes happen in those industries. The story isn't new, just the scope.

Exactly, the political finger pointing is absurd.

Thank you, lakeview's post (post #9http://www.usmessageboard.com/8082203-post9.html) also points out important issues in the fall of the city.

Of course...it's the poor black man's fault.

 

[Katzndogz]

Detroit is an example of what happens when union legacy benefits cost more than the material to make the product.

Detroit's fate was sealed when Coleman Young was elected Mayor and decided to run the city as a black separatist enclave. He considered it a separate state and ran it that way. Predictably, whites were run out of the city and took the black middle class with them. Whites leaving the city, during the Young years, was a benefit as it removed toxic votes that would not put race first.

Then of course Detroit elected black Kwame Kilpatrick who was a criminal in his own right and used the City as his private ATM machine. Shockingly, Detroit was able to shake off it's racial loyalty to convict Kilpatrick of corruption.

 

[JWBooth]

Exactly, the political finger pointing is absurd.

Thank you, lakeview's post (post #9) also points out important issues in the fall of the city.

Of course...it's the poor black man's fault.

The beast has many fathers.
City management that drove people out should not have blame deflected from them in a silly effort not to notice because of race.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Republicans are thrilled that Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. Because - for the GOP - the fall of Detroit is a talking point goldmine. Over the past year , the American public has started to wake-up about the total failure of austerity both here in the United States, and across the Atlantic in Europe. So the chance to blame the decline of a great American city on Democrats, workers , African-Americans and big-government is an opportunity the Right doesn’t want to miss.

Conservatives like Neil Munro and Sean Higgins hope that maybe - just maybe - if they can convince the American people that big bad unions and Democrats are to blame for the death of Detroit, then they can get them to forget that conservatives have destroyed this country with 30-plus years of Reaganomics and voodoo economics. Union-bashing is bad enough - but there’s another, even uglier dimension to the GOP’s Detroit meme. The Motor City is eighty-five percent African-American. In fact, it has the highest black population - percentage wise - of any major city in the United States. So when Republican pundits and politicians talk about “mismanagement” and “bad governance”, what they are actually saying is that black-people aren’t capable of running a city.

Blaming minorities for social problems is a tried and true Republican tactic. Reagan had “welfare queens” and the air-traffic controllers. The modern GOP has Detroit. However, it wasn’t unions or black people that bankrupted Detroit - it was decades of pro-corporate and anti-middle class free-trade policies that gutted the city of its industrial core. Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear a lot of hand-wringing from conservatives in the media about how Detroit is a sign of things to come and how this is what happens when you give Democrats, workers and “disorganized people” (that’s right-wing doublespeak for African-Americans ) control of a big city. But remember, the Republican solution for Detroit is just more of the same: gutting social services.

This is disaster capitalism. It's an opportunity for wealthy white speculators to experiment with all of their austerity dreams. And if that comes with a chance to demonize poor people, black people, and unionized workers - well - that’s just the icing on the cake. - See more at: Disaster capitalism killed Detroit. | Thom Hartmann - News & info from the #1 progressive radio show

Disaster capitalism killed Detroit. | Thom Hartmann - News & info from the #1 progressive radio show

30+ years of Reaganomics has destroyed Detroit.

Progressive economics does not allow for any ownership -- not even of their failed ideas

 

[lakeview]

WEll it wasn't that much of a problem UNTIL the auto industry strated laying off and then guess what?

All those formerly well paid citizens of detroit no longer had enough dough to keep that city viable.

We see similar cases all over the former INDUSTRIAL BELT of the northeast and midwest.

This is something that some people like to believe, it's not true though. Only one of the Big 3 has ever been headquarted in the city of Detroit in my lifetime and most of the manufacturing and assembly plants weren't located in the city, the workers didn't live in Detroit either. It was the downriver suburbs that got hit the hardest when the auto industry wasn't doing well because that's where most of the workers lived, primarily Lincoln Park, Southgate, Wyandotte, Trenton. To the north there was Warren and East Detroit. Livonia and Redford to the west also were home to quite a few autoworkers and still are. Those towns were the ones that took it on the chin.

Even during WW2 the assembly wasn't done in the city, tanks were made in Warren and bombers were built in Willow Run which is not even near Detroit by any reasonable definition of the word.

 

[Indofred]

Detroit is an example of what happens when union legacy benefits cost more than the material to make the product..

There's a lot of truth in that.
Whenever unions get power in any industry; they're fucked.
We had that in the British steel and coal industries and that cancer spread to pretty much everywhere.
Luckily, Thatcher rose to power and smashed the idiots.

Detroit didn't have that lifesaver so their industry is knackered.

 

[Jroc]

So now, as we discuss Reagan and Bush causing the Bankruptcy of a city, Romney and Bain Capital are now tied to the State of Michigan...by no coincidence. Is Michigan going Bankrupt?

I hate to break it to you but Detroit is in Michigan. And the Republican controlled state of Michigan is withholding money from Detroit.

You're an idiot Detroit is 18 BILLION DOLLARS!! IN DEBT

 

[RoadVirus]

Are Liberals EVER going to give up in their attempts to make Republicans at fault for Detroit's downfall?

 

[RoadVirus]

So now, as we discuss Reagan and Bush causing the Bankruptcy of a city, Romney and Bain Capital are now tied to the State of Michigan...by no coincidence. Is Michigan going Bankrupt?

I hate to break it to you but Detroit is in Michigan. And the Republican controlled state of Michigan is withholding money from Detroit.

And the state government probably has a good reason for doing so. For one, they know the numbskulls that run the city suck at money management. I mean, look at Mayor "Hip Hop" Kilpatrick.

 

[Steven_R]

What capitalism? You mean democrat control? Yep, it usually does lead to disaster.

The economic crash was under Bush and the decline of American auto industry supremacy started under Reagan.

It actually started in the 70s with Datsun and Toyota and Nissan making inroads into the car market because they could sell their cars for cheaper and were more reliable in the process. We haven't even gotten into union demands, the adoption of robots, the EPA and NTSC regulations, and a crumbling infrastructure yet.

 

[Rshermr]

What capitalism? You mean democrat control? Yep, it usually does lead to disaster.

The economic crash was under Bush and the decline of American auto industry supremacy started under Reagan.

It actually started in the 70s with Datsun and Toyota and Nissan making inroads into the car market because they could sell their cars for cheaper and were more reliable in the process. We haven't even gotten into union demands, the adoption of robots, the EPA and NTSC regulations, and a crumbling infrastructure yet.

The inroads were in the 60's and continued through the 90's and beyond. Now, you may remember that Nissan and Datsun are the same company. Datsun changed it's name to nisan. And of course there were others, like mazda, vw, audi, etc.
But the problem, if you really study it, was one of stuborness by the us automakers to change. They liked the concept of selling cars based on style, even with oncoming foreign car companies cleaning their clock by bringing in cars that did not have annual model changes of major proportion, and that concentrated on reliability instead of just style changes.

So you can really not blame those problems on unions. The management of car companies had no gun to their head when they made deals with unions. The unions did not underfund benefits provided to unions under collective bargaining. And unions, of course, gave up a very large portion of their bargains won in prior times, for which they get no credit.
Epa, etc. can not be blamed. The issues are relatively trivial, and the foreign car companies are governed the same as us makers if they intend to sell in the usa.