While Snyder made his announcement on Wayne State University's campus, a few dozen protesters gathered about two miles away at city hall, clutching signs that read "Snyder, Go Home!" and "This is a takeover!"
March 2, 2013
State takeover of...
... Detroit.
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Unions destroyed Detroit. How do you fix it? Probably impossible.
or - get rid of the corrupt union/democrat money laundering machine. Nah - can't do that.
Much easier to blame something else - you know - like republicans.
I don't believe that unions destroyed Detroit. The race riots started the decline, and the ensuing crime that came after that made recovery impossible. The unions just finished off the city. Without revenue, the city couldn't meet the obligations to the union retirees, let alone pay for the current union members.
AllenS has it mostly right. I would add that the automobile companies were resolutely blind to the attraction of foreign imports, both from a design and performance perspective. It was as though Detroit allowed its engineers and designers to look at and sit in foreign cars but not to open the hoods or drive the cars. When they tried, too late, to adapt their offerings were often cheap crap. Much of the gravy was siphoned off the earnings by bad management coupled with ever hardening work rules. Too bad.
The victim mentality destroyed Detroit People who lived there kept voting for corrupt politicians who told them their problems were the fault of the man.
Things like getting an education and keeping your family together were not important, because the man wasn't going to let you succeed anyway.
Being told your problems are the fault of someone else is a powerful drug.
"A report commissioned by Snyder has described what it called "operational dysfunction" in the city government, crushing debt of $14 billion and a current fiscal year budget deficit of $100 million."
Sound familiar? Anybody in Washington DC paying attention?
The two poles of the black response to the first world are "You didn't build that" and "Gibsmedat." Where that comes from, how that is made, the conditions necessary to make that possible...all of no concern. Somehow, miraculously the magic cargo will keep coming...until it won't.
Detroit, like all of America, gets and got the government they wanted and voted for.
So there it is. I hope they like it.
A major reason that the auto industry started in Detroit was its location. It sat halfway between Minnesota iron and Appalachian coal and had lots of water. Those ingredients went into steel which went into cars (along with paints and plastics of course). Products could be shipped out too by rail or aboard ships. When the domestic steel industry went into decline because the higher grade ore in Minnesota played out, steelmaking elsewhere became competitive.
It took a long, long time for Detroit's industry and its ingenuity to unwind--it still smolders like an ember--it's not dead cold.
Finding another Great Lakes source of iron would help Detroit immensely.
Thank you, Michael. Twice.
What about selling it (or giving it away) to Canada? That would make more sense. And no the Unions/liberals didn't destroy Detroit - if they did why are SF, Seattle, Boston, and Manhattan doing so well? Lets not talk about the Elephant in the room. That would be "nasty".
Unions destroyed the steel industry, too.
Finding another Great Lakes source of iron would help Detroit immensely.
At this point it wouldn't make much difference. Most industries have left Detroit.
AprilApple said...
Unions destroyed the steel industry, too.
There's an argument that environmentalism hurt the coal and iron mining industries too. Sure, unions were involved as was investor greed, etc. (Don't you watch "Justified"? ;)
Also, don't forget what happened to auto design. The Ford T-Bird tells that story visually if you put each year's model in series and compare them from 1955 onwards.
Small government conservatives in action!
GM was destroyed by not only bad management, but by the unions.
GM gradually became a baby- sitting factory that made a few cars on the side. Cars people don't want to buy anymore. Ingenuity took a back seat to union wages, union work rules, union corruption.
GM is Detroit. Kill GM and you kill Detroit. Are other factors at play? yes. But look at the blue city and blue state models like CA and Illinois. Is there a common denominator? oh - I guess not.
Subaru offers a different perspective. Employees are happy and well paid, but no union machine, union dues hovering over to destroy their profits.
Small government conservatives in action!
Your blind devotion to partisanship, even at the cost of absolute catastrophe, garage, is admirable, I'm sure, in some way that no entirely sane person can understand.
Better to go to hell in a hand basket than for things to actually work, so long as Democrats win!
GM gradually became a baby- sitting factory that made a few cars on the side.
Altered to fit the product, you could say precisely the same thing about the education industry and its Diversity racket.
Poor city design. Huge city and no subway type public transportation and every thing is spread out.
We'll see this all over the Rust Belt, eventually. And on the East Coast in places.
The ants have consumed all there is and the grasshoppers will have to be the adults.
Again.
AllenS said...
I don't believe that unions destroyed Detroit. The race riots started the decline, and the ensuing crime that came after that made recovery impossible. The unions just finished off the city.
I saw a piece a while back making the claim that a lot of the Motor city's decline can be laid at the feet of Coleman Young, a hard core Lefty if there ever was one.
garage mahal said...
Small government conservatives in action!
No, responsible adults.
Like love and marriage, ya can't have one without the o-o-o-ther.
Renee said...
Poor city design. Huge city and no subway type public transportation and every thing is spread out.
That's LA too. There is a subway now, but too few riders compared to East coast cities. Part of it is ticket pricing I've observed. DC really has that aspect down.
Altered to fit the product, you could say precisely the same thing about the education industry and its Diversity racket.
Compared to other developed countries, the United States has the worst educational quality per dollar spent on schools, ranking 18th in reading and 28th in math. Millions of American children are being shortchanged by dysfunctional schools, but efforts for education reform are invariably stopped by powerful union interests.
These unions fight tooth and nail against any meaningful change to their comfortable status quo - while students and taxpayers pay the price.
Voters got rid of the emergency law on a statewide referendum. So Synder and Republicans just rammed the same law through again. Big government knows whats best for you.
garage, the city can't pay it's fucking bills. Is it that hard for you to understand this fact? Why should the state continue to prop them up?
AprilApple wrote: "GM was destroyed by not only bad management, but by the unions. GM gradually became a baby-sitting factory . . ."
I got that far before I realized she was writing about General Motors, not Garage Mahal.
Did you even read the article, Garage?...
Here, let me help..
A report commissioned by Snyder has described what it called "operational dysfunction" in the city government, crushing debt of $14 billion and a current fiscal year budget deficit of $100 million.
lies! Detriot is just fine!
and...
Snyder would not identify the top candidate to run Detroit or say whether the person was from Michigan. Some residents and restructuring experts have said he should name an African-American to manage the city, which is 83 percent black.
Referring to the candidate, the Republican governor said, "They have vast experience working on relationships, they have strong financial knowledge, strong legal knowledge and that ability to say how do we build teams and work together," the Republican governor said of the candidate.
Snyder had acknowledged last week that many qualified people did not want the controversial job.
Takeover! eeek.
Anyone want to clean up the mess?
Hello? You will be blamed for everything, fair or not, real or not. Any takers?
60 years of one-party rule. Stay away and enjoy the decline.
Compared to other developed countries, the United States has the worst educational quality per dollar spent on schools, ranking 18th in reading and 28th in math. Millions of American children are being shortchanged by dysfunctional schools, but efforts for education reform are invariably stopped by powerful union interests.
Not true. The poor showing of the US in international standardized tests is mostly an effect of demographics and not attributable to unions. If unions are really the problem, please explain why the non-union public schools in Georgia aren't the best in the nation.
Unfortunately for would-be education reformers of all political stripe, educational outcomes are mostly a reflection of the quality of the students, not the teachers or the school.
The Governor and the state should just walk away. Let Detroit file for bankruptcy and let the courts deal with the mess.
Some things that are now done, catastrophically badly, by the government of Detroit, will now be done, only moderately badly, by the government of Michigan. Net effect on the size of government: nil.
From the CS Monitor:
"Detroit is saddled with a $100 million cash-flow deficit by June 30, in addition to an accumulated deficit of $327 million, a financial review team reported last week. Even more serious is its $14.9 billion in unfunded pension and retirement liabilities. The city needs $1.9 billion to fund liabilities within the next five years, but to date has no plan."
Own it, Garage. It's your party and your philosophy that created it.
Own it.
I'm not seeing your Georgia stat on that blog.
The person who writes the "Kurdish-Swedish perspectives on the American Economy. has a high opinion of the American school system. OK. But he is not fucusing on the failures in our inner city schools and the lack of alternatives for the parents in certain poorer demographics - in cities all over the nation.
Certainly there are pockets of good news. It's the poorer failures that get swept under the rug.
My point is that teachers unions
often stand in the way of meaningful change. Choice? Can't have it. Their answer is always the same - we need more tax payer dollars.
from your blog link "Kurdish Swedish perspectives on the American Economy"
"...Similarly, the left claims that the American education system is horrible, because Americans don’t invest enough in education. The left has no answer when you point out that the United States spends insanely more than Europe and East Asia on education. According to the OECD, the United States spends about 50% more per pupil than the average for Western Europe, and 40% more than Japan.
People are more likely to leave a city because of a high crime rate than because of police brutality......The depressing thing about mayors like Coleman Young, Ray Nagin, Sharpe James, Marion Berry is not that they're incompetent but that they win reelection......I suppose the upward pressure that the unions put on wagess and benefits contributed to the auto industry's decline. On the other hand, in the long run we're all dead and two generations of auto workers outlived their employers.
Mitt Romney to fix Detroit?
The decline of GM is certainly the basic cause of the decline in Detroit's economy. But the bankruptcy of its government is the result of policy failure. It looks like the government responded to the steady decline in its tax base by continually increasing its tax rates instead of cutting spending. Keep doing this long enough and you eventually end up on the wrong side of your Laffer curve, with no way out of the mess except bankruptcy.
I think of Detroit as our own version of Greece. Or the USA by 2020.
William said...
People are more likely to leave a city because of a high crime rate than because of police brutality......The depressing thing about mayors like Coleman Young, Ray Nagin, Sharpe James, Marion Berry is not that they're incompetent but that they win reelection.
Could it be black people vote the color line?
Isn't that rrrraaaacccciiiisssstttt?
Some of y'all have it right on elements of Detroit's decline. It wasn't unions initially. It was corruption per se. In terms of the automobile industry and its impact on Detroit and the major suburbs, the decline began long before the 1967 riot.
In my opinion, with some personal experience with the individuals impacted, the real decline began with the appointment of bean counters, finance men, to run outfits like Chrysler and General Motors. That was circa 1961. Everything else followed upon that, including the white [and black] flight subsequent to the riot, as well as the take over of industrial unions by service unions. As we speak, black flight has increased once again...anyone who can go, gets out....e.g., people with jobs.
The 1960's and later bean counter CEO's had short term financial myopia and the industry didn't begin to develop a long term strategy until Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan {Datsun], and Honda had already grown to the top ranks. This topic may be the only one Michael Moore has ever been right about....he just didn't grasp the why of it all.
Dave Bing has tried, he's not a corrupt thief [no need to be]...but his options are limited by service unions, massive debt, massive infrastructure deterioration, and a city council of idiots, with one or two exceptions among the 9.
I was stunned when Bing agreed to leave a plush retirement in Franklin Village to become Mayor of Detroit. Apparently the brother for brother thing got to him...e.g., he got guilt tripped by those who'd continue the corruption and figured he'd be a complacent house ni**er.
I do not envy whomever Synder appoints....he/she'll have a target on their back from day one.
My kid now lives in the core sliver of civilization in the downtown center. It is expensive. When I visit I seldom see anyone over 45 or so, mostly under 35, on the streets, in restuarants, theaters, etc.
Maybe that is a good thing...hope so, for my kid.
Chip S ...good point on taxes and tax rates. I haven't checked lately, but last time I did, Detroit was the highest in the entire state.
garage mahal said...
Voters got rid of the emergency law on a statewide referendum. So Synder and Republicans just rammed the same law through again. Big government knows whats best for you.
Try and follow. The next step for Detroit is bankruptcy.
The bills have come due and there is no money to pay them. find fault with who you wish.
Aridog, Detroit's overall tax rate on residents is triple the average for the rest of the state, according to the Free Press.
In exchange for these absurdly high tax rates, Detroiters get a structural budget deficit.
Is Garage using the McCarthy defense?
Basically crying McCarthyism when the truth is pointed out?
Maybe you should take over Detroit, GM - just go tell them to make more money and everything will be fine.
Did anyone see the Top 10 most miserable cities in the US? I think it was in Forbes.
LOLOLOL
Not radical enough! Detroit needs to be handed over to Omni Consumer Products. Dick Jones would whip that place into shape, literally.
Omni Consumer Products: We've got the future under control!
Chickelit, another huge iron find won't make any difference to their union workers. Or help the management smarten up.
garage? small government conservatives in action? In...Detroit? Are you mad? Severely deluded? Sarcastic?
I'll give Garage a little credit here. Having the state take over a city, like the feds deciding what the states should do, is exactly the sort of thing that should make anyone with libertarian small government leanings nervous. However, it's true that Detroit's problems are Detroit's problems. Just as the state shouldn't take it over, nor should it send Detroit money in any greater measure than it does to say, Grand Rapids, Flint, Traverse City or Kalamazoo, to mention a few cities that do well and a few that don't.
I think the take on GM and corruption is a little bit off. The money GM brought in got enough cash floating around for the corruption to become a profit center. And GM's decline meant there was no longer enough cash floating around to sustain both the city and the corruption. But it was the leaders of Detroit in the Coleman Young era who chose to keep the corruption and hollow out the city rather than clean up the government and the school system to keep Detroit going.
The state takeover is a screwup. Should have just let it go into municipal bankruptcy.
If massive iron or gold or unobtanium mines were discovered in Michigan no one in their right mind would locate a company anywhere near Detroit. A HQ would be put up at some greenfield site far, far away from Detroit.
In Detroit's case subways or mass transit would simply bring the crime from the city center to the outlying areas.
"Unions destroyed Detroit."
Not in the least. Poor management and competition--you know, that thing "free marketeers" claim to love, (though they're lying)--from foreign car makers.
What we are seeing is the result of 50 years of unchecked liberal democrat management.
Robert Cook said...
Ref: Destruction of Detroit
Poor management and competition--you know... blah blah
I believe I cited, way back there, the circa 1961 changes in automotive industry to Wall Street fellating financial managers instead of engineers and sales people as a beginning of the decline of the automobile industry per se ... not just Detroit. That decline runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, fool, and occurred independent of the particular problems of Detroit itself.
Detroit itself, was destroyed by itself, by its corruption, even before Teh "Coalman" Young, and compounded thereafter by Young's influence down through another generation, like "Kwame the Mommies Boy" (Yawz Boah!) who made financial sodomy of Detroiters a masters class and is STILL in federal court over it all.
In Detroit overt loud and proud racism against anyone not African American, as proclaimed by Young about getting out of town, lead to exactly that...whites and rational blacks, who could, leaving town for good.
Check out the suburbs of Birmingham, Farmington Hills, Southfield, et al., and even tiny but wealthy Franklin Village and Woodcreek Farms where deed covenants once prohibited anyone not white-Christian...yeah, those places where racist attitudes were eliminated, and black and other minority populations grew, while they were encouraged in Detroit...and one sucker from Franklin village, Dave Bing, got conned in to trying to make something of Detroit once again. In part he succeeded, with support from guys like Illitch, Karmanos, and Gilbert, among many others, in the core downtown strip, but elsewhere, he's just not black enough for the Common Council's liking.
Robert Cook...try lecturing on something you actually know about, not some where you may never have been, or if you have, you fear to tread. Those of us who live here find you comical otherwise.
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