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The Last Days of Detroit
The Guardian ^ | Friday 4 January 2013 | Andy Beckett

Posted on 01/05/2013 10:46:20 PM PST by MinorityRepublican

In 1920, Detroit was the fourth biggest city in America. Its population had doubled in a decade. Migrants, many of them African-Americans from the rural South, were drawn by its pioneering car factories with their unprecedentedly high wages. The manic, mechanised, overcrowded metropolis of General Motors and Ford also drew journalists and writers.

In 1934, Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times wrote about Detroit's "democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces … as truly a world capital as any city on earth … Paris dictates a season's silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life."

(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: detroit
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To: okie01

Read the History of Race Riots in Detroit....1863, 1945 and 1967. The problem was not Unions and it was not necessarily Democrats, see Pittsburgh, Seattle, Portland, etc. Guess the real cause, IOWs get a clue!


21 posted on 01/06/2013 6:17:16 AM PST by iopscusa (El Vaquero. (SC Lowcountry Cowboy))
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To: Obama_Is_Sabotaging_America

Apparently not. Per some of the comments, the fall of Detroit is a result of white racists. Obama saved what was left of it by the GM bailout. Also, the people who can save it are liberal hipsters and their creativity and urban farming.


22 posted on 01/06/2013 6:24:08 AM PST by Pinkbell
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To: MinorityRepublican

-——unsustainable manufacturing boom based on war production-——

Wow...... a precisely correct and very different angle providing a most meaningful view. It can be taken as a metaphor for the whole of America. I love it. It will be trashed by those here who long for a return to what briefly was. The lesson from Detroit is that it ain’t going to happen.

The industry of Detroit is now scattered across America and not only scattered but replaced by competitors offering better and more desirable products. BMW, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Nissan were found to be better and more acceptable than Oldsmobile and Pontiac and Plymouth and Imperial. (and Mercury and Lincoln)

The jobs that were based on war production and the aftermath of world destruction are gone from Detroit never to return. Detroit’s brief advantage of industrial concentration was dissipated by peace, reconstruction and competition.

That is precisely the state of America today. The brief advantage of not being destroyed, of industrial concentration, of relative peace and prosperity has been dissipated by competition abroad. Once the destruction was rebuilt, once there was recovery from the mental shock, once a newer generation came of age and took hold, The American advantage developed during the war was no more.

There are many who constantly write about the death of American jobs, of exporting jobs, of some magic potion that will bring it to an end, to a return to the brief spike in superindustrial triumph. They must read the Guardian article recounting the book authors’s words about Detroit. The message is plain. That which was will not continue forever.

America has experienced a period of rebirth it’s self. There has been positive change. Prior to the current Eurocrat debacle, there was both peace and prosperity. There was beyond full employment. There were so many jobs that it was necessary to allow illegal immigration on a large scale to get things done. America need not cry over what once was. The crying should be over what is. The Yankee Eurocrats are destroying America before our very eyes.


23 posted on 01/06/2013 6:28:03 AM PST by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 .....The fairest Deduction to be reduced is the Standard Deduction)
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To: MinorityRepublican
The article fails to even mention the two most important causes of Detroit's decline: Forced busing of school children, and unions. I lived in a Detroit suburb during most of the city's decline.

Parents left the city in droves when federal courts ruled that their children could no longer walk to the school just down the street, but must instead, be bussed many miles to some school which didn't have the appropriate ratios of skin color. It didn't take long before there was no longer any skin color mix left.

The other problem is unions. Corrupt unions, including teachers, cops, municipal workers, and industry have milked any remaining money out of the city.

24 posted on 01/06/2013 6:34:21 AM PST by norwaypinesavage (Galileo: In science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of one individual)
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To: Pinkbell

-— Per some of the comments, the fall of Detroit is a result of white racists. Obama saved what was left of it by the GM bailout. ——

I’ve come to believe that they can’t be reasoned with, simply because they have no regard for truth. They believe what they WANT to believe.


25 posted on 01/06/2013 6:37:36 AM PST by St_Thomas_Aquinas
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To: iopscusa

I’ve seen the kind of destruction swaths welfare-living ignorant people can bring to a city. It’s the anti-civilization. Everything they touch turns to sh*t. No one has a father. Every woman is cheating welfare, claiming more children than she has. A given woman will have a different father for every child. Children grow up wild with no discipline. Drugs are rampant. Crime is rampant. The deepest, darkest parts of Africa where cannibals eat their own people was never this bad. This is created by the destructive, masochistic, genocidal Democratic Party.

When you see Obama using every trick in the book to win what he wants and the Democrats going along with him — this is what they’re fighitng for. They want everyone living in squalor. With them living high off the hog. The black ‘elites’ in Detroit are millionaires. Everyone else is a pauper. Look how Obama lives in outrageous splendor, like a potentate. Meanwhile unemployment in the black population is sky-high and everyone’s living standard is sinking. Yet, they’re so indoctrinated and trained to hate that they can’t even see the truth staring them in the face. It’s all utterly insane. Obama maniuplates them with his anti-white, anti-rich-man (also anti-white) hate.

Detroit is a civilization built on hate — they hatred of Democrats for the virtues of hard work — the hatred of so-called Democratic and black leaders of everything white — the stocked-up hatred of blacks for whites, Jews, Asians and anyone who succeeds. I’ve seen black people seethe and nearly foam at the mouth about Koreans who have opened grocery stores in their decrepit neighborhoods. It’s sick, sick, sick.


26 posted on 01/06/2013 6:46:16 AM PST by WashingtonSource
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To: Bon mots

IF you ask me, Shanghai was a lot prettier in 1990...


27 posted on 01/06/2013 6:51:23 AM PST by Little Ray (Waiting for the return of the Gods of the Copybook Headings.)
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To: garjog
Now it is a fifth world hell hole — thanks to liberals running the place into the dirt.

Yes, yes, it's the liberals.

The same liberals who run Portland, OR, Burlington, VT, and in fact run Windsor, ON, the "city of roses", right across the river.

And yet, those places are quite pleasant, in fact thriving, at least if you like granola and bike paths.

Are you SURE it's the liberals?

28 posted on 01/06/2013 6:55:11 AM PST by Jim Noble (Diseases desperate grown are by desperate appliance relieved, or not at all)
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To: Jim Noble
Are you SURE it's the liberals?

Hmm,let's see. It is also about 83% black with the Detroit city council 100% black. Wonder how that fits into the equation?

29 posted on 01/06/2013 7:07:09 AM PST by Altura Ct.
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To: P.O.E.

I remember visiting my Aunt Freda and Uncle Paul in the 50’s, (I was very very young then), Belle Isle was nice, as was the housing in their neighborhood. (Which today would just be the “HOOD”.)


30 posted on 01/06/2013 7:21:30 AM PST by Las Vegas Dave
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To: Impala64ssa

Perfect example of workers vs slackers.


31 posted on 01/06/2013 7:23:10 AM PST by Vaduz
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To: Las Vegas Dave

My uncle used to work at Ford HQ, we used to visit them in Dearborn back in the 60s early 70s. Now it has the country’s largest Muslim population, and where they’re trying to implement sharia.


32 posted on 01/06/2013 7:37:05 AM PST by P.O.E. (Pray for America)
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To: MinorityRepublican

I think that every Republican press conference should be held in Detroit.


33 posted on 01/06/2013 8:22:57 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: MinorityRepublican

“For a currently declinist, anxious America” - That’s the key phrase in the whole article. A Brit sees us as declinist and anxious. Why? We are a nation blessed with tremendous natural resources and with great ports on two oceans. Why should we be in decline? We have lost our way, thanks to the Democrats. Democrat ideas are toxic to America.


34 posted on 01/06/2013 8:33:48 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: hosepipe

Is that Dana Perino?


35 posted on 01/06/2013 8:42:54 AM PST by csmusaret (I will give Obama credit for one thing- he is living proof that familiarity breeds contempt.)
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To: okie01

“Yet, oddly, I didn’t see a single word about why.
Isn’t that an issue that needs illumination, as well? All this fascination with the Ruin that is Detroit today. Yet, no curiosity about how it came to be? “

It be racis’ to talk ‘bout it...


36 posted on 01/06/2013 10:57:02 AM PST by Road Glide
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To: csmusaret

LoL...


37 posted on 01/06/2013 11:06:19 AM PST by hosepipe (This propaganda has been edited to include some fully orbed hyperbole..)
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To: MinorityRepublican
The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep (Detroit is dying. But, it is not dead yet)
38 posted on 01/06/2013 11:30:55 AM PST by Gritty (Local Russians shouldn't compare our Democrat Party with communism.ItÂ’s absurd.-D Savino (D-NYSenat)
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To: MinorityRepublican

I visited a supplier in Detroit a few years ago. I flew in at night. The city itself was dark, most of the lights were in the ‘burbs.


39 posted on 01/06/2013 4:41:19 PM PST by Some Fat Guy in L.A. (Still bitterly clinging to rational thought despite it's unfashionability)
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