Detroit is what happens after 51 years of Democrat control

Detroit.

don't know where you're from but Republicans have controlled the legislature and governor for nearly 20 years and the debt has gone up by more than 1/3 in that time.

 

San Jose lead the nation in median income, followed by San Francisco, and Washington DC. All these municipalities are fiscally sound, and all have been run by Democrats for decades.

None, however, was unilaterally dependent upon the American automobile business when it outsourced operations and subsequently collapsed.

Of course, the bankruptcy of ultra-conservative, rich Orange County in 1996 is ample testimony that you need not suffer an industrial cataclysm to run into financial difficulty, no matter whether your ascendant politicians fancy a D or an R after their name.

In fact, Detroit's decline began under Republican rule in the estimation of U S News, but it would be silly to place an inordinate portion of causation for a failed industry upon any politicians. The failure was primarily attributable to the corporate decision-makers, in the best tradition of capitalism.

 

I heard a black caller on C-Span this morning, blaming "white flight" essentially for the ills of Detroit. Let's for the sake of argument agree with his contention.

When you look at the hypothesis objectively, it says nothing about whites but everything about blacks. By default, the caller was telling anyone listening that the black majority is responsible for the Fall of Detroit, and we can further expound upon that theory by looking at the true wastelands and ghettos and dens of failure in America, and see that the worst are those with a high black population.

And from there we can decide for ourselves why this is the case.

 

The state is doing fine. It is democrat run Detroit and flint that are failing. The governor doesn't control either cities budgets or their police force or their regulatory committees. They only recently got right to work. If anyone is trying to save that town it is the republican governor.

 

Wahsington DC is fiscally sound? How much debt money needs to be paid to people before something is unsustainable to a democrat? California sized debt not enough? What about the largest debt ever in recorded humanity? Is that enough for dc politicians? Dc public schools are no model for sustainability. The rest of the country can't live on all that tax money too.

Where are the highest taxes, and home prices and lowest PPP in our nation? Is it San Francisco and San Jose?

Already the middle class flees San Francisco :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/families-flee-san-francisco_n_1335639.html

If you want to point to all white super rich enclaves and call that sustainability for sure. There are many limousine liberal towns that push out the middle class. Palm beach is one. The left after all embodies the wealth gap they complain about with very rich people making that big stack and the people at the bottom getting raked by their protectionism and special carve outs etc..socialism is after all not about making everyone equal, it is about the few getting rich and powerful and the rest of people having to leave if they can for opportunity. Texas or bust is the motto of the middle class in super liberal California areas.

 

Like in Detroit democrats and unions could screw up a steel ball with a rubber mallet on a carpet floor. They are crooked and use taxpayer money to buy votes so they can stay in office.

 

Detroit had too many eggs in one basket and that was car manufacturing. Corporate Union greed and Detroit's government set the wheels in motion for its failure. The fact that there is more blacks then whites may have contributed but as the last item on the list for white people to finally give up and move out of the city. Blacks are in no way responsible for the fall of Detroit but they will expand to areas that are now deemed poverty neighborhoods. Empty buildings where businesses once thrived will become ghettos if no one invests in those areas.

 

What did corporate greed have to do with it? Have auto stocks been such a good buy? Have they cut salaries and kept up with the market? Or resist automation to keep more union workers in a job while losing competitive edge and posting weak profits?

Corporate greed... Corporations built that city. Liberalism tore it down.

 

by forcing it into bankruptcy.

 

Knee-jerk ideological berserkers in their fixation are making the Rockettes look like paraplegics, but here's a sane analysis of Detroit's rise and fall as the vageries of capitalism both built and destroyed it.

 

I believe you have a one track view of the situation - and I don't entirely disagree with it. Unfortunately, we haven't even touched on the effect of the automation explosion on American manufacturing, nor the effect it had on the auto industry and Detroit.

I'm an automation programmer at a large diesel powertrain manufacturing and assembly plant. We went from 4500 employes in the late 60s to 1200 employees by the early 90s, mainly due to the effect of the automation revolution on blue collar workers. We doubled production during the same time that we decreased the workforce by one forth its 60s decade levels.This was typical of many large manufacturing industries of the period, and our local economy certainly bore the negative impact.

Today we are still a UAW plant of around 1000 employee level, and in spite of what you would probably consider exorbitant wages for blue collar workers, we are quite able to make large profits from year to year and remain globally competitive. In fact, contrary to what most knee-jerk anti-unionists would be willing to believe, the company poured another $100 million into the facility and it is a model of high tech wonders - and EVERYBODY (management and labor) is doing quite well, as is the local economy. My only gripe with the UAW is its cozy, cronyistic patronage with the Democratic Party which (IMO) is as lame as the same nonsense habituated by the black community.

I said all that to say this - blaming EVERYTHING on Democrats and their welfare state policies along with unions is always convenient but not always an entirely accurate assessment.

 

Corporations in the past had more integrity and cared about their workers and they were rewarded by making them big profits in their day. That changed and they became loyal to their stockholders and became self absorbed in their own personal gains. Automation should not have been resisted and the money should have been put into evolving the company to create jobs that automation took over. That is what you do in a changing economy and not the way it was done with the big players taking everything they could before it collapsed.

 

I am not involved deeply in the United States Politics; yet, i find your post so very far from truth. Blaming the fall of a city such as Detroit on a political party is baist and seems to be a part of a political campaign arranged by a republican. Why?

Why are the real reasons behind the Bankruptcy of Detroit?

1- The car industry in Detroit suffered due to several reasons due to severe competition from the Asian manufacturers.
2- Outsourcing and Automation caused higher unemployment
3- 1967 Riots caused high migration out of Detroit and certainly harmed its economy
...

I am no expert, however, doesn't take an expert to realize common sense

 

Just to be fair and balanced, I want to make it clear that I no more attribute the monumental corporate success of the American auto giants during their golden age, and the tax base that provided for Detroit, to the politicians running the city then than I do the consequences of disastrous corporate decisions that killed the profitable industry in recent years.

Politicians are only on the periphery of such free market ventures - and rightly so. Under capitalism, both credit and culpability devolve primarily upon corporate executives, of course.




.

 

You know the unions resisted automation and re-tooling and all that right? They ate up the money that could have gone to that. Why do you think a company can pay ever increasing wages without it hurting somewhere in their production?

 

Except most of the foreign cars bought here, are also produced here (e.g., they have factories here, like this). And Foreign companies tend to pay better... so, I don't see the problem.

Force those f*ckers out of business. It's not impossible for American manufactures to compete, just GM (right now), because they wouldn't adjust. And companies that don't adjust, deserve to go under.

The Car sector doesn't exist for the sake of GM, GM exists for the sake of the car sector, and the moment GM isn't producing value in it, it is natural for it to be outmoded and replaced.

 

sadly this is what so many do not get, people did not just one day decide to stop paying their bills, stop paying their mortgages, the jobs just went overseas, no jobs, no bills get paid

less jobs equals less taxes collected, less jobs equals less buying of stuff, which leads to even less jobs and round and round it goes

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Really? Progressive and liberal are now bad labels? That is beyond pathetic Riot. Though I never knew the right likes to change history as well and twisting it for their own end, you conservative. Seeing as how you neglected to mention several key factors.

1. Fisker and Valmet Automotive (the Finnish car manufacturing plant) signed the assembly contract back in 2008, so they decided to build the Karma vehicles at Valmet long before Obama gave the $500 million loan to Fisker.

2. They couldn't find anyone in America because there is no automotive plant that builds specialty cars; and they usually build it for other European Automotive brands, for example Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Opel. None of these brands are based in Finland. And now that I think about it, with GM, only a dozen of their assembly plants are based in Michigan. The rest are in other states, Canada, and other parts of the world. With Chrysler, only 10 out of their 18 U.S. based assembly plants are based in Michigan. And as for Ford, 7 of their U.S. plants are based in Michigan, while the other 7 are based in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and other states. So basically shouldn't you be lambasting the big three automotive brands for not bringing more jobs to Detroit and Michigan instead of other states and countries?

3. Obama gave loans to 3,300, and out of those. Only abooooooooooooooout 5 went bankrupt; that is less then 1% of the total amount of green companies Obama gave loans to that went belly-up. Not quite the "oh so many" you claim. http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/22/news/economy/obama-energy-bankruptcies/index.html

Next time, try to be a little better with the facts, you conservative. Whoops, I did the name calling again, sorry moderators.

 

Which is why, I don't really give two hoots about Reid, he's just a crooked politician. Both sides have that.

 

Yes. Now even though I think that Detroit's problems ultimately stem from something of this dynamic, I really don't think it's from that alone. Detroit, IMO, represents a kind of perfect storm of negative economic factors. Many that have contributed to this thread have some particular aspect of the problem that they think is THE key factor. I don't really know if there is such an overwhelmingly outstanding factor. Maybe there is and maybe one of the posters really has it pegged. For me, it's a difficult thin to weigh out - as in, separating out and comparatively determining how much of what produced what.

One thing though. I don't know that someone that merely approaches something like the economic demise of Detroit out of nothing more than a partisan desire to bestow exclusive blame on their political opponents is going to be able to offer much beyond just that. There was a helluva lot more going on there than can be explained by politics alone. Again, I'm no expert on this and it's merely another opinion - and you know what they say about opinions.

 

You failed to talk about how now this company is up for sell and china may be the one to buy our investment. So as American the invested in a company over $500 million and they can't find a way to make them in America? Fine so our money went into the technology and development which now will be bought by china for for pennies on the dollar. What a great investment for china. We pay millions for the tech to be developed and china gets our investment for next to nothing. Sounds almost like Clinton's missiles sells.
Hell couldn't Detroit make Obama drones? Lord know he needs more of them.

 

So you are telling Detroit that Obama gave $500 to a company he knew that they weren't even going to build the cars here? You would think for $500 million we could of ask to at least build the made in Finland tags for the car. How much money did Finland give them? It must be hundreds of millions.
Maybe if we took the $500 million and used it to renovate a plant to build green cars in Detroit. That would be investing in Americans. I don't care much for the fact that my money will just go to advance china so more. Hell clinton already sold them missile tech why should the progressives sell them out green tech. Why would china even spy on our tech companies? Just wait long enough and the left will sell it to them for pennies on the dollar.

 

He is a particularly powerful and particularly corrupt one.

 

Well, the real problem was that the american auto industry made (*)(*)(*)(*)ty products for so long that everyone realized they were better off buying Japanese cars. And now, since they made no effort to make better, more affordable cars, detroit's main source of prosperity is dead, and the city is bankrupt.

 

They started going downhill before that. Decades before that. Old argument is old.