Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering Sores

The American Dream ^ | 1-1-2012

[yldstrk]

A friend and I went up to Green Bay to see a concert. What a disaster. We were not used to the decay the liberal governments up there have wrought being from further south.

[silverleaf]

Lincoln and Roosevelt both lived in times when wage slaves were brought to America to do the work here

[detective]

“The Great Depression was caused by the drop in domestic demand resulting from the unraveling of the debt bubble built in the 1920’s boom. Not unlike the situation we face today as the debt overhang must be worked through.”

The Great Depression was originally caused by the Federal Reserve tightening up the monetary policy. This caused the economy to contract. The Great Depression was sustained for 10 years by the policies of the Roosevelt Administration which created an economic climate that was hostile to investment and productivity.

The Great Depression was ended by the demand for U.S. goods that occurred because of WWII.

Manufacturing jobs are decreasing in the U.S. for several reasons. The first is productivity. Only high value added jobs can survive in the U.S. The second is that there are simply too many costs, risks and headaches involved in making anything in the U.S.

When someone invests in plant and equipment in the U.S. they have a target on their back. They are subject to lawsuits, regulations taxes, etc. The U.S. worker has been so poisoned with the victim mentality (”I feel sorry for myself”) that the work ethic is dead.

By the way the average company in the South was facing approximately 1,000 lawsuits at any given point in time. There are a swarm of trial lawyers who prey on U.S. businesses especially manufacturers.

If you want to sell something in the U.S. subcontract and or outsource the manufacturing. That is the only way to survive.

[listenhillary]

Why can’t my state look out for it’s own interests and enact a 50% tariff on every imported item from other states? My state is being destroyed by cheap imports from other states in the US.

I look forward to your answer.

[aruanan]

Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering Sores

Geez, they were always festering sores, but just with a lot more jobs and decent people. Pittsburgh used to be, as recently as 1965, a giant cloud of dark smoke. New York City, until Giuliani turned Times Square and surrounding areas into Disney New York, was pretty seedy (and over that same time vast tracts of Brooklyn between Prospect Park down to the waterfront that were not safe to very unsafe got re-gentrified into something pretty nice). Chicago, until Obama dug us into what appears to be a permanent recession, was reclaiming a lot of the property south of the city. South of the loop has had great growth extending toward the south and Hyde Park/Kenwood on the south side have had renewal (and not the high rise crime slum type) spreading both north and south.

This area seems much less dangerous than when I came in 1994 (watch me get robbed and killed today, ha ha) and, according to one Freeper, who was here in the 1970s when students had to cross the Midway in groups and carrying baseball bats for protection, it had improved a lot since then.

[little jeremiah]

Umm, many in our gov have gotten dirty money and allowed our manufacturing base to go to China.

China is pure, unadulterated evil and their “products” suck.

[yldstrk]

I completely agree. We do not owe developing countries our own suicide

[aruanan]

Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering Sores

When I lived in NYC in the mid 1970s, there were huge numbers of very beautiful old buildings, brownstones, apartment buildings, along major thoroughfares standing abandoned. This was traveling between the Ridgewood neighborhood near Bushwick through which ran what used to be called the LL line, past the big cemeteries near Cypress Hills, and along the street that went between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights until you got over by the Brooklyn Zoo and the Brooklyn Public Library near Prospect Park, where things got nicer. I read that the reason was rent-control. The city had made it too expensive for landlords to keep up their buildings and, so, they ended up abandoning them.

[A.Hun]

Show me where US manufacturing has declined (other than short term recession related).

If you want to hate China, go ahead. There is plenty wrong with them, but, they are not the reason for our current economic woes.

[Bon mots]

So you pay import tariffs.

Couldn't be simpler. Pick a lane.

So you are suggesting a Smoot-Hawley tariff regime to solve the problem?

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and WRONG.

Taxes do not solve any problems, just create new ones.
Ronald Reagan once famously said, the problem is not that Government doesn't tax people enough, but that it spends too much.

I also believe that it regulates too much.

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There is no simple fix for the numerous problems our nation faces that cannot be fixed during a single election cycle, nor even a decade. Some of these problems are around for decades, but the effects have been so long-term, that only now is it being noticed.

The hollowing out of industry was somewhat hidden by the 'fix' of pumping money into housing... old factories were converted into residential condominiums in many choice locations... so the decay was limited to the worst places... this is no longer feasible. Housing booms will no longer be the salve on de-industrialization.

We have a brewing perfect storm with a variety of problems, any one of which could be fixed... but as a coctail of ills are impossible to remedy without some sort of revolution.

1.) Social Security Ponzi Scheme
2.) The Federal Reserve System
3.) A Fiat Currency
4.) Sovereign Debt of more than the nation's GDP
5.) A union-run, failing education system
6.) Excess litigation
7.) 3 levels of taxation (Local, State, Federal) as well as hidden taxes in every imaginable area
8.) The switch from HTM to MTM accounting (2007)
9.) 13% welfare-dependent minority 'workforce' which is resistant to education, prone to violence and criminality and devoid of familial responsibility and decency
10.) "War" on everything with seizing assets the main focus
11.) Eminent Domain
12.) A fast emergin Police State and the institutionalization of society.
13.) More than 2 million Americans on a government payroll
14.) More than 50% of the population gets money from the government.
15.) More than 45 million collect food stamps (that's a hidden 'bread line')
You could write a chapter on each of the above, see Daniel Ryan's post to me in this thread...

When is the last time you saw a new shining factory go up in the big de-industrialized city near you?

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Shanghai - 1990 and Today

Detroit 1949 and Today

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[wardaddy]

Despite the fact that I (unlike almost anyone else here) was raised in the late 1950s thru mid 1970s into an upper middle class family in Jackson MS that was fairly moderate about civil rights and black enfranchisement.

I had no close kin in the Klan, my rich paternal grandfather refused to join the Citizen's Council and I was spanked for using the word “nigger”.

We had black help both at home and did not treat that like that horrid movie about our friends the Stocketts called The Help and in our large family contracting and pipeline business. My father promoted blacks to supervisory positions and the Klan burned down our office trailers as a gesture. Some of our friends who were more liberal on black rights had their homes burned actually.

My dad was friends with Charlie Evers and Aaron Henry and I grew up around the Derians and Greenville Hodding Carter clan.

First funeral I attended was our black handyman killed after too much Dr Tichenors one night and slammed into a guardrail and died a week later at University. A long funeral. He had taught me how to hunt at our swamp camp..deer..ducks..squirrel. he had showed up orphaned as a 15 year old lost on my grandfather's estate and they had put him up and employed him...that was in 1939. He died in 1968 with a large brood some of whom went to Alcorn with our family help....I wept like a baby...still can if I think about it much

So even though my dad and grandpa were open minded on black voting rights that was where it ended. They were Goldwater GOP types and wanted nothing to do with all that legislation GOP folks then and now clamor over about how proud they are about it and they knew it would make blacks dependent.

They lived in a culture of generations of large black populations and were under no illusion about the shortfalls in a general sense even though they helped the exceptions climb out of it when they could

It was admittedly a paternalistic relationship...very southern...something northerners never fostered...they just freed them...and tried to make them a dependable voting block and eschewed mixing with them. We took care of them. I think history can now judge which way worked better insofar as how better off the black family and crime culture was.

Now...it's all muddied up. White guilt basically trumps everything but the fear now weak whites have over being called bigot over anything minority..not just blacks...homosexuals, women, religious minorities, latinos...and so forth

But on black culture. I know it as well as anyone here who isn't black and have lived immersed in it worldwide.

There is literally no topic here which freepers are as a rule more ignorant of, more wrongheaded about and preen about completely unaware of how much of the problem they actually are. And I wa flabbergasted to find so much of this here my first day 11 years ago and to see this dripping hatred here by some of my culture...the culture that is one of the last stands for traditional America.

I am not easily offended but I am offended by folks with no experience in black culture lecturing me about how it works from the comfort of Iowa or central Nebraska and who feel that the fortunes of blacks rise and fall like tides dependent upon how whites treat them. That is racist actually but they never get that...it completely escapes them.

Instead they blame slavery, the South (never the north), Jim Crow, or Colonialism as though what explains black cultural shortfall worldwide is white contact.

How does that explain places where there was no white contact to mention..never white rule?

and do they think tropical Africa would now be civilized all by itself had white never touched that region?

that geographical isolation has always been my own explanation of why things are as they are ...with any isolated culture there is often a lag and yes exceptions rise above it but still there it is...

we ignore that because we can't handle the truth...or we fear it...so instead we just lower everyone else...and this is not just about black culture...we will do the same over amerindian illegals culture as well...mark my words

our ancestors both here and in Britannia were under no such illusions and they made as big a mark on the advancement of civilization the world has ever known

we are...due to our own inner weakness...running as fast as we can back in the cave

the past 50 years have produced Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and a few others for our side...but at what a cost

cultural evolution is inevitable but we applaud collapse as progress?

rant off...I expect to be treated as the ghost of Sam Francis any second

PS...I miss puroresu

[Soul of the South]

“If you want to sell something in the U.S. subcontract and or outsource the manufacturing. That is the only way to survive.”

My point is we need to change the regulatory and legal environment to make investment manufacturing in the US attractive again. Otherwise we will continue to see our standard of living decline. Trade policy needs to be revised as well as government regulation. Tort reform is also needed to reinstate barriers to frivilous lawsuits. A “loser pays” requirement would go a long way toward making attorneys and plaintiffs think twice before going to court. In addition limitations on legal fees in class action suits improve the system. Finally, judges should not permit attorney fees to be paid in cash to “winning” attorneys in class action lawsuits when the members of the class they supposedly represent receive no tangible economic benefits.

I agree the Federal Reserve in the 1930’s did shrink the money supply which compounded the effects of the Depression and the policies of Roosevelt may have prolonged the crisis. The ramp of factories to support the war effort and the conversion of those factories to consumer goods production after the war ended the Great Depression. My other point is there were idle factories in the US to convert to war production and later consumer goods production. When the factories were shut down and sent overseas in the 1990’s and first decade of the 21st century the equipment was sold and scrapped and many of the buildings razed. There is no idle capacity to put people back to work and end the current depression. Major changes to trade policy, regulatory policy, tax policy, and the legal system will be required to make investment in US manufacturing attractive again.

Without high paying manufacturing jobs, at all levels (production floor, product design, engineering, planning, logistics), I don’t see this country as able to sustain the large educated middle class required for a free society to flourish. History shows that societies consisting of a small group of elites lording over poor masses tend to be totalitarian.

[Jabba the Nutt]

The RNC, is it had a brain and the desire for victory for bigger reasons than its own perks, would run a series of tv ads. The ads would be simple, videoscapes of American Cities. The taglines would be “The Democrat Party Plan for America”. Then [name of city}, run by Democrats since [year], the percentage vote for Democrats [%]. Democrats want to control everything, this is how they go about for success. Democrat Party success = America’s failure. Vote Republican everywhere.

[Bon mots]

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[Bon mots]

Should mention, that in my previous post - the growth in Shanghai was created by businessmen, entrepreneurs and individuals.

The mess in Detroit by politicians, unions, lawyers and taxation/regulation of business.

[stars & stripes forever]

Why should God help a nation...

He is God. His promises are true. The example of Jonah and the city of Nineveh is an example of His mercy to wicked nations that repent and turn to Him. He would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of 10 righteous men.

However, if people and nations do no turn to Him, they face the consequences of His justice.

[little jeremiah]

I don’t need to show the blind anything. China is part of the problem as it is corrupt to the very core, and corrupt US politicians and corrupt coporations are the other parts of the problem.

Profit isn’t god and destroying the environment as has happened in China are also in the mix. High taxes also drive manufacturing elsewhere. There is “plenty” wrong with China is putting it so mildly it makes me wonder if you are Chinese or are paid by them to post.

[Pelham]

Pat Buchanan wrote about it in one of his books. It’s going to become a major political issue, maybe next election cycle as unemployment remains high and the economy continues to fail for four more years.

[Road Glide]

“You are proposing to return to a bygone, idyllic world dominated by high tariffs. This bygone world does not exist anymore.”

You’re correct in your assertions.

The only problem with this reality is the [modern] “world” (at least within the borders of this country) that has been created as a _result_ of “free trade” has resulted in a system that may be socially and economically unsustainable and one that will inevitably collapse around us.

Total “free trade” dictates that the essential underpinnings of an economy — that being, it’s ability to manufacture the things with which to sustain itself — will be “offshored” to those places were it is cheapest to do so. An example: steel production.

Remember the explosion within the gun turret on the USS Iowa years ago? I recall reading back then that the technology to repair the ship no longer existed in America, and that they might actually have to send it to Japan to rebuild it. (Aside: I don’t think this was ever done; the damaged gun turret was simply ‘retired from service” afterwards.)

To me, that incident speaks volumes as to where we are headed.

Sorry, I have no solutions to offer. I’m a working-class stiff, not a professor.

But the paradigm of “free trade” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, too late we may find that, rightly or wrongly, it became a major step in our undoing....

[WilliamIII]

The RNC, is it had a brain and the desire for victory for bigger reasons than its own perks, would run a series of tv ads.

I wish it were as simple as Democrats - bad, Republicans - good. Unfortunately, the outsourcing of American jobs has been going on under both parties, since the early 90s.