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Forums - General Discussion - So Detroit is now Bankrupt...

papamudd on 23 July 2013
Pipedream24 said:

No, this was not avoidable unless you could go back in a time machine and stop the riots back in the 1960's. it was the beginning of the end for Detroit. After the riots,the slow migration of all the decent hardworking citizens began. At its peak, Detroit had over 2 million people living in it around 1960...now it's down to around 800,000 with over 20% unemployment. My Grandparents used to tell me how beautiful the city was when they grew up...but when I was a kid growing up in the 80's, I couldn't believe them. The city was already a warzone. Buildings boarded up everywhere, drug houses all over the place, and nasty hookers littering the blocks. My grandparents were the only Caucasian people living on their street and they held out as long as they could. They bought there house in the late 40's and finally got forced out of their  house when bullets sprayed through their walls from the crack house next door. That was around 1990.

If you have never been there, Detroit is a massive city when it comes to the amount of area it covers. When you lose that many tax paying people and have to provide services to same amount of area cost will get out of control. Tack on 40 years of Coleman Young and Kwame Kiltzpatrick running the city and you have a recipe for disaster. Those two may have been the most corrupt mayors in the countries history and the people of Detroit just kept reelecting them...not  that they were helping the city, but because they were democrats and the color of their skin. Not that it really mattered. When you have a police force that was severely underpaid, a less than 50% high school graduation rate, and empty buildings everywhere, you have a recipe for disaster. It's a real shame because you have a real nice area developing around Greektown and the stadiums downtown. But if you stray a couple blocks watch out.

People have thrown out ideas about demolishing half the city that is abandoned and turn it into farmland. You could reduce the cities service bill, create jobs, and get rid of the abandoned parts of town all in one shot. But it was shot shot down instantly by the corrupt government and all the lazy welfare recipients that might actually have to work for a living.

As far as the auto industry goes, most of the factories have been in the suburbs for quite some time. So the recent downturn in the U.S. auto industry only had a minimal effect on Detroit's tax revenue. But as some of the above posters mentioned, you can blame that on the unions. When you have janitors making over $20 an hour, getting time and a half and double time on the weekends, you have a serious problem. The plants shut down for a month and all the workers still get 70% of their pay for the month....seriously??? And they still have all their vacation and sick days. Paying huge bonuses for years to people already earning 50k a year working the line with a high school education and they expected the industry to survive. I hope the UAW is happy. They destroyed the pride of Michigan. 

Detroit will not comeback in my lifetime. And unfortunately this is going to start happening more across the country. Oakland, California will be the next big city to file bankruptcy. It's another city that has been blue for 50 years and is in the same situation as Detroit. 

And what's even scarier is that our Federal Government is running the entire country the same way these cities have been run. How much longer can the Fed keep printing money before the U.S dollar is worthless. The whole system is broken. Things need to go back to the way our founding father's laid out. Have the Federal government deal with military and foreign concerns and let the states run themselves. Stop regulating, policing, and spying on your own citizens. But I fear it's too late and whether we like it or not we are no longer a democracy and are crossing the line into a solicialistic state run by corporations.

End Rant and sorry for bouncing around on my train of thoughts.


sorry for quoting a wall of text, but it does deserve a read twice :P... though I'm drinking and could only read once. Overall I think you outlined a lot of things that are important to this discussion. (as far as I can tell)



Talal said:
I will permaban myself if the game releases in 2014.

in reference to KH3 release date

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the2real4mafol on 23 July 2013
Marks said:
the2real4mafol said:

The other day, it was announced that Detroit was filing for bankruptcy, the largest American city, if not the largest city in the world to do so. I find it quite depressing really, that once a great city has been allowed to rot like this. I shouldn't be suprised though, as cars was it's heart, it's what made Detroit. Once manufacturing of cars left for Asia in the 80's and 90's, the city sort of died i guess but to think in all this time it hasn't really been re-invented yet. It has been allowed to wallow in the past. Just one of the great flaws of capitalism i guess, as profit was put first and so companies would rather exploit Asian workers rather than employ people in their home country. And to think this could of happened in many cities around the world if they weren't reinvented. The Eastern parts of London come to mind for me, that area became a dump in the 80's but does ok now because of the financial district and the investment from the 2012 olympics. 

But anyway, let's discuss this. 

1. Was this avoidable?

2. How can Detroit become prosperous again? if possible

3. Will we ever learn from the mistakes of Detroit? Where most of the city's economy was based off making cars and nothing else. 


It's the UAW's fault plain and simple for ruining the auto industry. When will people learn that union's have outlived their usefulenes and are now doing more harm than good? At the turn of the century they were useful for getting safe working conditions, overtime pay, etc. but now they just demand outrageous wages, all the time off you could want, and protect unproductive workers from being canned. 

Disband the UAW (U Aren't Working) and you will see jobs staying in America instead of going to Mexico. Or at the very least make Michigan a Right to Work state and let workers choose to leave the union but keep their job. I'm sure many workers will find conditions the same, and will enjoy not having part of their salary go to Union dues. 

Oh so whenever a industry fails, always gotta blame someone like the unions have you? You don't realise how useful trade unions are do you? Without them, we would still be working 16 hours a day for a few dollars a day. The work would be deadly due to a a lack of safety regulations. There would be child labour. The workplace would be filthy. The factories would be far more polluting. You could just go to a Chinese or Indian factory and you would see what your work would be like without the imput of trade unions all because the companies are just greedy. I'm sure they could get there products made in a developed country and still make money.

Without trade unions, i'm sure companies would go back to their exploitative ways. Without no one pushing for the worker to get the best deal, wages would remain flat despite inflation. They would get away without allowing people to have holidays off every now and then or have sick pay. The way i see it why should the lazy executive get millions and yet the hard working people who make the products, the workers get barely enough to live on? 

And another thing, if American car companies want to be popular again, they need to make fuel efficient cars now. 



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killerzX on 23 July 2013
the2real4mafol said:
Marks said:
the2real4mafol said:

The other day, it was announced that Detroit was filing for bankruptcy, the largest American city, if not the largest city in the world to do so. I find it quite depressing really, that once a great city has been allowed to rot like this. I shouldn't be suprised though, as cars was it's heart, it's what made Detroit. Once manufacturing of cars left for Asia in the 80's and 90's, the city sort of died i guess but to think in all this time it hasn't really been re-invented yet. It has been allowed to wallow in the past. Just one of the great flaws of capitalism i guess, as profit was put first and so companies would rather exploit Asian workers rather than employ people in their home country. And to think this could of happened in many cities around the world if they weren't reinvented. The Eastern parts of London come to mind for me, that area became a dump in the 80's but does ok now because of the financial district and the investment from the 2012 olympics. 

But anyway, let's discuss this. 

1. Was this avoidable?

2. How can Detroit become prosperous again? if possible

3. Will we ever learn from the mistakes of Detroit? Where most of the city's economy was based off making cars and nothing else. 


It's the UAW's fault plain and simple for ruining the auto industry. When will people learn that union's have outlived their usefulenes and are now doing more harm than good? At the turn of the century they were useful for getting safe working conditions, overtime pay, etc. but now they just demand outrageous wages, all the time off you could want, and protect unproductive workers from being canned. 

Disband the UAW (U Aren't Working) and you will see jobs staying in America instead of going to Mexico. Or at the very least make Michigan a Right to Work state and let workers choose to leave the union but keep their job. I'm sure many workers will find conditions the same, and will enjoy not having part of their salary go to Union dues. 

Oh so whenever a industry fails, always gotta blame someone like the unions have you? You don't realise how useful trade unions are do you? Without them, we would still be working 16 hours a day for a few dollars a day. The work would be deadly due to a a lack of safety regulations. There would be child labour. The workplace would be filthy. The factories would be far more polluting. You could just go to a Chinese or Indian factory and you would see what your work would be like without the imput of trade unions all because the companies are just greedy. I'm sure they could get there products made in a developed country and still make money.

Without trade unions, i'm sure companies would go back to their exploitative ways. Without no one pushing for the worker to get the best deal, wages would remain flat despite inflation. They would get away without allowing people to have holidays off every now and then or have sick pay. The way i see it why should the lazy executive get millions and yet the hard working people who make the products, the workers get barely enough to live on? 

And another thing, if American car companies want to be popular again, they need to make fuel efficient cars now. 

thats an utter ridiculous lie, and you know it.

8 hr work days with above minimum wage was implemented without unions. (see: henry ford)

and if a company decides it wants to implement a 16 hr work week and pays its employees a couple bucks, i say let them. and let see how many people decide to work for them, and how long they stay in business with those kinds of business practices.

you really dont have any concept of reality when it comes to how markets and businesses operate, do you?

 

 

"The way i see it why should the lazy executive get millions and yet the hard working people who make the products, the workers get barely enough to live on?"

 seriously or you guys trying to be parodies of communists? is this some kind of joke. ceo's dont work? only their employees are hard working? I would like to see a company be run without a ceo, or with one of those "hard working people" be the ceo, and see how long the company stays solvent.

and those poor working, forced into slave labor, getting paid pennies a day, being abused by their bloodsucking bosses. dont make me laugh



dharh on 23 July 2013

Show me a functioning Free Transparent Market in Modern History, anywhere. Go ahead, i'll wait.



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gooch_destroyer on 23 July 2013

Off topic: while one of our cities are crumbling; we're seem to be more interested in some birth of a child in the UK.



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sales2099 on 23 July 2013

Very unfortunate. To my memory Jay520 lives there. Hope he is unaffected by this.



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Mr Khan on 23 July 2013
dharh said:
Show me a functioning Free Transparent Market in Modern History, anywhere. Go ahead, i'll wait.

The trouble is that so much of the argument in favor of unrestricted capitalism assumes the existence of transparency, when transparency is one of those things that a government would have to regulate into the system.


For instance, the anti-regulationist argument against Environmental Regulation: "if people are mad that 3M's been dumping pulp waste in the ocean, they'll stop buying 3M!" But do you think 3M is just going to sit back and let people learn about the extent of their polluting habits? Hell no. You buy off the journalists who would report on it, or sue them for slander and keep them tied down for years in the courts. You hire people to go into the street and discredit the people complaining about the pollution as vigorously as the law would allow. That's even being idealistic enough to assume that they would follow the laws that still existed in this hypothetical model.

Proper capitalism would actually need a very vigoruous regulatory government making sure that everyone was playing fair, namely through enforcing constant transparency and the dissemination of information, so that all market players could be empowered to act logically by being as fully informed as possible. Even if we removed regulation from the equation, major corporations' Legal and Marketing Departments would make sure things went their way, even if they had no government officials to bribe.

An issue that PipeDream24 brought up that I would like to address is one of urban sprawl. There are still plenty of jobs in the greater Detroit area, but very few of those are in actual, municipally incorporated Detroit. The other issue is the sheer size of Detroit. Like many governing bodies throughout history, Detroit increased its borders when times were good and they had the money to support and provide services for a lot of people spread out over a large area. The decline in Detroit's population is evenly spread to a degree, so you end up with all of the old neighborhoods still occupied, but at nowhere near capacity, which combines with them having to cover (with police, firefighting, road crews, etc) the same geographic area with less money coming in.

Unfortunately, the best situation, aside from fucking over pension-holders (which is a bad idea because it will savagely demoralize the city's public servants, causing many of them to resign and move elsewhere and make the city's recovery nigh-impossible), would be a large-scale declaration of Eminent Domain, buying up these worthless, but occupied, properties all over the city, and forcing all city residents into a smaller geographic area. It would then be easier to provide services to these people, and the city could then raze all the unoccupied neighborhoods and sell the land for commercial development (tax-incentivized)



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Kasz216 on 23 July 2013
Mr Khan said:
killerzX said:
Mr Khan said:
 

Unions protect us all from exploitation, and are the only reason that a 40-hour work week is the standard. Too much Union power is not the answer, but neither is a lack of unions.

If all of the working class suffers in poor working conditions, who is going to drive the economy? The super-rich can only buy so many yachts.

except for the inconvienient fact that the 40 hr work week was implemented without unions.

and no, unions dont protect us from exploitation, in fact they like bending us over and giving it to us. they free market and the free transferance of information is what protects us from exploitation. which is why when a state becomes right to work (giving people the option to opt out of the union, not being forced into it) almost everybody leaves the union. 

at bolded: you are seeming more and more each day to actually be a parody of a socialist, and not a genuine statist.

The employer holds the natural bargaining power in any given situation. The workers need mass representation in order to prevent exploitation. If you don't think this country isn't absolutely stupid with worker exploitation (from the so-called job creators) today, then there is no hope for you.


Except the problem is... State unions are also voting blocks that basically overpower local politics granting huge unsustainable benefits for local politcians.   Which were the problematic unions... not the UAW.  (Heck, auto industry is doing great right now!)

I think that's secretly why some public unions require you to live OUTSIDE the city to be a part of the union.  That's how the cleveland paramdeics union works.  If you live IN cleveland you can't be a paramedic in cleveland.

Of course that said, while state unions were a huge problem, it's not like they were the only problem.  The giant shrinking of the city in population while keeping the same land size played it's part as well.

 

It's all really just a message on how well meaning laws can end up fucking over everyone, including those it was meant to help.   A number of laws meant to help out cities and the poor ended up crippling a large number of cities.  Crosstown bussing desegregation being a big one.

That just wasn't the best way to handle defacto segregation.


The biggest employers in the city of detroit are the various state run entities of the city of detroit.  That put's it plainly why at this rate they will never make it back to even... the bigger percentage the public sector is of the workforce, the more you have to tax the private sector to pay them.  The city is just too big... with too few people.

 

Additionally, the real issue here is going to be the lawyers for the pensioners.  Chances are the cut to pensions will be even across the board.  If the poorer pensioners were smart they'd band together and get their own represnetation to cut out the bigger city officials pulling down 6 figure pensions.



the2real4mafol on 23 July 2013
gooch_destroyer said:
Off topic: while one of our cities are crumbling; we're seem to be more interested in some birth of a child in the UK.

Yeah i think that baby made me a republican, as in I want a republic not join the American party. I'm fed up with the media worshiping the monarchy now, why should we continue such a daft tradition? They aren't any better than us. Shame about Oliver Cromwell though, that failed big time.  



Xbox One, PS4 and Switch (+ Many Retro Consoles)

'When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the people's stick'- Mikhail Bakunin

Prediction: Switch will sell better than Wii U Lifetime Sales by Jan 1st 2018

Luck on 23 July 2013
killerzX said:

and if a company decides it wants to implement a 16 hr work week and pays its employees a couple bucks, i say let them. and let see how many people decide to work for them, and how long they stay in business with those kinds of business practices.


Yeah, let's get rid of all those stupid laws; all those big noble employers, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Target, Kroger, Sears, Home Depot (...) they won't make things worst for their employees, they will ferociously fight for the best ones, offer more advantageous working conditions, who could seriously believe otherwise ? And if they don't, well those workers with mostly no education, loans (?), kids (?), well they can just get a job at google or simply go back to school, it's that simple!