Detroitus

Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac
--Cadillac Ranch, Bruce Springsteen

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
--No Coward Soul is Mine, Emily Bronte

People just uglier, and I have no sense of time
--Stuck Outside of Mobile
With the Memphis Blues Again,
Bob Dylan
_____________________

Watching a PBS special on the ways Detroit's city fathers are struggling to save the city engendered some RAW thoughts.

Detroit is dying, and social and support functions cannot be adequately administered unless the city pulls in its perimeters and relocates its inhabitants to population clusters. This clustering will facilitate the administration of municipal functions, to include police and fire protection, to more restricted areas requiring less funding. The problems and proposed solutions indicate that our wars are coming home.

Detroit's solution reminded us of COIN policy and the never-successful "Strategic Hamlets" in the Vietnam War. In Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. reverses the flow, sending the police and Army down to live with the people for the same reasons that we would cluster populations in Detroit. But that approach will not work at home because the funds are not available to nation-build one of the formerly greatest cities in America.

So we pull in our perimeters and pray for the best, when prayers are as impotent as a politician's promises (read my lips.) The strategic hamlets failed in Vietnam because we never won their hearts and minds and the government could not act as an honest broker for the welfare of the citizens trapped in the strategic hamlets.

Now it is U.S. citizens being forced into this same humiliation which signals the foreshortened horizons of the new America. Ranger wonders if the new resettlements will be surrounded by razor wire barricades as we imposed in the Iraqi conquest.

Wild, Wild Midwest

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun--
My dream.
--A Long Time Ago, Langston Hughes

These cinders need more to be a fire
While the ghosts of the soldiers
That lived there before us
Laugh with their guns by their side
--Life in a Tenement Square,
Flogging Molly

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?
What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child
There is power in a Union
--There is Power in a Union, Billy Bragg

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife
--Union Maid, Woody Guthrie
_______________

A Wall Street Journal report this week hails Detroit as a Nuevo Ghost Town, with a population at the city's 1910 level. Even Eminem's scowl can't save it from that plight (Detroit's Population Plunges).

According to the census bureau, "The number of vacant housing units doubled in the past decade to nearly 80,000, more than one-fifth of the city's housing stock." While blacks and whites continue to flee, the Hispanic population is increasing.

Of course we all know the once-proud Motor City has been falling apart for some time, manufacturing jobs drying up, the mortgage crisis providing the coup de grace. But foreign powers see opportunity in our degradation, with BMW's Greer (S.C.) campus employing 7,000, and generating thousands of other ancillary jobs.

The non-union autoworkers at the U.S. BMW factory earn $15 an hour, about half of what their German counterparts earn. "'We are a low-wage country compared to Germany,' said Kristin Dziczek, director of the Labor and Industry Group at the Center for Automotive Research, ", which means the middle-class to which manufacturing workers once aspired is now a pipe dream (In its biggest foreign market, BMW gets skilled workers for Less.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the U.S. rebuild Germany after WW II? Ditto Japan and Korea. The facts of globalization are evident and painful. We have become the Turks working for non-American industrial giants. That has certainly worked out well for us.

What were we fighting for? Wasn't it the right of labor to unionize -- an absent feature of totalitarianism? Didn't the trade union movements, opposing oppression, first crack the facade of communist controls in Poland and elsewhere? It wasn't U.S. military might or Uncle Ronnie that achieved this objective.

"[An]Obama administration commerce official who visited the [BMW] campus last week, Rick C. Wade, called the plant an "example" of what is possible to move toward the president's goal of doubling exports in five years." But, 70% of the vehicle manufactured in the Greer plant go to Germany, so how is this a win-win as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) would have it? We are out of control when our losses are scored as wins.

What if the administration had used the auto bailout money to buy out BMW, Toyota, Kia and Hyundai, and then legislated trade barriers for the auto industry? The business of America is business, but shouldn't that industriousness benefit America? Ranger news flash: Superpowers do not have foreign factories flourishing within their borders, while their own companies flail.

The Obama administration may try an sugar coat this, but the bitter pill is a death knell to our working class once grounded in the factories of America. This is a harbinger of our future, which will be union-free and management-friendly because labor has become beggars at the global banquet.

The death of unions = the death of the middle class.

NOTE: Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which killed 146 mostly young immigrant women, and gave the impetus for factory workers to unionize. The ensuing labor movement bettered worker's conditions substantially.


--Jim and Lisa

Little Pink Houses

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors
Departed, have left no addresses
--The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

I'm sitting down by the highway
Down by that highway side
Everybody's going somewhere
Riding just as fast as they can ride
--Your Bright Baby Blues, Jackson Browne
______________

The federal deficit sits at $1.42 trillion, a figure greater than the total national debt for the first 200 years of the Republic. Our debt is greater than the entire economy of India.

Meanwhile we pursue our endless wars to shed our grace on the sandbox nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can't seem to give houses away in our blighted-but-once-thriving city of Detroit (Detroit House Auction Flops for Urban Wasteland):

Despite a minimum bid of $500, less than a fifth of the Detroit land was sold after four days.

The county had no estimate of how much was raised by the auction, a second attempt to sell property that had failed to find buyers for the full amount of back taxes in September.

The unsold parcels add to an expanding ghost town within the once-vibrant town known worldwide as the Motor City.

The number of houses in default in Detroit has more than tripled since 2007, and is expected rise. The homes being auctioned represented only the 2006 foreclosure rolls, well before the worst of the economic downturn (GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy this year.)

The number of U.S. homes in foreclosure rose to 938,000 in the July-September quarter, up 5% from the previous quarter (U.S. Foreclosure Filings Rose in Third Quarter). Combined with unemployment rates at a 26-year high, foreclosures are projected to hit 3.5 million this year. Funny thing to have happen on the way to a rosier economy, news of which greets us each day in the papers.

Even if the homes were given away, the poor and underemployed would not be able to cover the maintenance and taxes; that's how this mess started in the first place. Well, perhaps it is some solace that we are kicking about trying to improve some wasteland, somewhere. So Detroit withers away. Buh-bye.

On an upnote: We hear cycling among the ruins in Detroit has become something of a biker's paradise. You see, the lack of civic activity provides for untrafficked boulevards. Broken glass can be a problem, but if you outfit your mountain bike with Kevlar Panaracers, you should be o.k. Weapon suggested.

Why doesn't real estate in Kabul and Baghdad suffer such indignities of neglect? Perhaps if the denizens of Detroit formed proper militias, the U.S. government would turn their sights there, and do more than sympathize with the abysmal plight of our citizens.

Where will Toledo, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland and Detroit get the funds to update their dilapidated infrastructures? Where is the Coalition of the Willing which will save our citizens?

The financial institutions of America are as brutal to the American dispossessed as the Taliban are to the average Afghan citizen.

Motown, Motoring Down

Hello Detroit auto workers, let me thank you for your time
You work a forty hour week for a livin', just to send it on down the line

Hello Pittsburgh steel mill workers, let me thank you for your time
You work a forty hour week for a livin', just to send it on down the line

--40 Hour Week, Alabama (1985)


Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line.

Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore

Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got.
Something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face

--Allentown, Billy Joel (1985)

____________

It was with grim irony I chose Alabama's lyrics. Can you imagine the GWB of photo-op fame actually looking those people in the eye today? Some thanks.

Forbes sees Detroit as one of its prognosticated Ghost Cities of 2100.

"Detroit's population has fallen by around a third since 1950 and now equals about 950,000. It is expected to shrink slowly but steadily until at least 2030; unemployment inside the city is more than 10%. If trends hold, Detroit will be altered beyond recognition by 2100."

Bill Bonner, in The Life and Death of Great Cities, writes of Detroit as an incidence of national betrayal.

It is a provocative piece, comparing Detroit, our metropolis on the descent, with the once- thriving Chinese metropolis of Kaifeng which, 1000 years ago, was the capital of the Song Dynasty, with more than a million people. "At the time, Detroit didn’t even exist."

In Motor City, "even during wartime, the assembly lines didn't slack off - instead, they sped up, working around the clock to provide trucks, jeeps, tanks, to armies all over the world. War or peace, everyone seemed to want more and more vehicles. How could you go wrong buying property in the city that made them?"

"If you believe that, you should get on a plane to Detroit now. Whole skyscrapers change hands for less than the price of a 3-bedroom apartment in Mayfair. The 65-story David Stott building, for example, is on the market for $3.5 million. For less than a million you can buy a 12,000 square foot Italian renaissance-style mansion, complete with an intricate, hand-carved walnut main staircase and imported wood paneling throughout.

"That may seem like a bargain," says a CNBC reporter, "considering the 1915 limestone house sits on over 2 acres and is just 3 miles from the city center. But then again, this is Detroit, Michigan."

"Kaifeng is a now a small, grimy, poor city," and in its stead are financial capitals like NYC and London. In 2007, the new "money-shuffling commerce" is booming.

"All over the world, companies are getting set up, financed, bought out, refinanced, IPO'ed, taken private, merged, acquired, re-IPOed and leveraged in more ways than you can count. It will be a cold day in Hell when the Chinese can compete in this industry."

For the more traditional investors, Bonner suggests they might do better in Liuzhou, China, where GM is producing its new Wuling Sunshine mini-van. "In 2002, China made a million cars and trucks. By 2020, it's expected to produce 15 million units, more than the United States. How can Detroit stage a comeback with that kind of competition?"

For now, "London and New York are on top of the world - just like Detroit once was. Just like Kaifeng once was. Prices can only go up, right?"

--by Lisa