Posted on 02/11/2011 9:28:43 PM PST by wheresmyusa
AMID THE animated rodents, smushed test-babies, snack-food perversions, and crude humor of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads was a powerful, two-minute homage to Detroit, America’s most abject city. Over a pulsating soundtrack of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,’’ viewers were treated to panning shots of some of Detroit’s lovingly restored landmarks from the days when the auto industry made it the richest city in the United States. Today it is the poorest, with a 36 percent poverty rate.
Far from avoiding its grim, rust belt image, the ad — ostensibly to introduce a new Chrysler luxury sedan — celebrated the city’s guts-and-grit industrial base, its smokestacks, its hard times. “It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel,’’ the narrator intoned.
It was a goosebump moment for sure. But it will take more than an appeal to regional pride to save Detroit, home to 80,000 abandoned buildings and an unemployment rate of 29 percent. It will take a national urban policy the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen for 40 years.
Detroit is only the starkest symptom of decades of wholesale disinvestment in the nation’s older urban centers. The same conditions obtain on a smaller scale from Trenton to Buffalo to Lawrence. “If you don’t have a platform of national policy you’re really sailing against the wind," said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
But Katz would broaden the lens to include a new economic plan for the whole nation. For too long, he says, America’s economic policy has focused on consumption, home ownership, and the financial industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
You know, when I lived in the country back in the 70’s, damn near every house had one of those that DIDN’T work with the working TV on top of it.
It was used as furniture. They would get them when someone threw it out cause the woodwork was so nice and then put their working TV’s on top.
Coleman Young was an out and out racist. He was mayor for life in Deeetroit. How did all that work out for the brothers again?
“You can revolutionize your ** on out of here.”
And they did.
Coleman Young’s ideological successor sits in the White House.
We all need to get to work on 2012, 2014, 2016, . . .
Did you notice that the folks who talk about saving Detroit are always from somewhere else? The planners keep trying, but how do you plan a tax base that was squandered? Do you order people to live there?
Yep. As a general rule, if when the Brookings has an economic idea it’s a bad one.
mmmmmmmmm.....detroit... is this where the high spped rail is going to be linked according to Biden and Obama? Sounds great for the economy in this area. Is anyone home?
No one has mentioned busing folks in....look what that did for education!!!
Right in the middle of a kevlar mandatory part of "the D".
Sad and predictable at the same time.
CC
Yep, with the inference being that if you disagree with their programs you're "dumb".
CC
“Detroit passed the tipping point back in the Sixties. It’s too late to do anything but plow it back into the farmland from which it emerged a century ago.”
I agree. I have yet to hear a reason why Detroit is needed as a city...or even a town anymore. It seems more like NYC in Escape from New York.
“Nobody wants to admit that when technology allowed companies to operate from less urban areas (where they wouldn’t have to house, feed, and “educate” a large population of our permanent underclass with tax revenues), then the city model was doomed. “
Like Marysville, Ohio. In the middle of nowhere. Honda sets up shop there and builds millions and millions of cars over the decade...and not a penny sent (directly, at least) to the any government entity in Michigan. Very smart move by them.
You caught Obama's attention with that comment!
*snort, snort*
“This photo of Coleman Young speaks volumes. Be sure to note the sign being held up behind him: “
Gotta love the Honkies (i.e., useful idiots) in the photo also...or were they...Maybe they instead just hated blacks and their goal was to crush the city. Either way, they got that result. LOL.
Would business of its former scale ever want to come back there, even if by some miracle the union grip died. They’re no longer making tons of steel on the shores of the Great Lakes.
Think Troy or some of the ruins of say Carthage or Persepolis.....Detroit is on the way there
Detroit broke itself. Detroit needs to fix itself.
It would seem to me that there is so much that could be reclaimed -- books, furniture, household goods, woodwork, stained glass -- that an enterprising individual or group could make a good living rescuing stuff from Detroit's ruins and shipping it off to other places.
Decent photoshop absent the palm trees.
I left Detroit in 1970.
C-Span recently interviewed a new Congressman from Detroit. He spewed the usual BS of more government to help the city.
I called in and spoke to the audience, not the guest. “If you want to see where the democrat party and labor unions will take the country, visit Detroit. No, better yet, take a holiday in Detroit. If you want to make the US a mirror of Detroit, keep voting for democrats.”
For some reason, the phone line went dead.
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