[Fishman]

"And what would a Republican mayor have done differently? Free enterprise, an unfettered marketplace sent the jobs to Japan." No, auto jobs still do quite well in none union states. The vast overentitlement , corrupt Dem machine crushed Detroit.

The rest translated
Do not answer that the Unions were the fault( I don't want you to actually bring up the obvious cause). The high cost of living (brought on by unions) in America is the fault. We can never compete with slave wages in slave countries that don't depend expensive infrastructure (but overpaying folks here is a great idea). YOU want freeways, skyscrapers, malls, endless air-conditioning and heating, large McMansion AND free trade AND plenty of work AND a free markets (and the Dems wanted unlimited entitlement with no one actually having to work). But YOU (Detroit apparently) can not have it all. Something had to give. It gave.(Sucks that's it consistently Democratic managed cities)

[Fishman]

Pops, sorry to have to disagree with you again, but Detroit is pure Democratic, if it fails its clear who is the cause. The question with peak oil will be who best leads us down the slope. Detroit is a perfect example of post peak oil,/carbon reduction/ downsizing done the Democratic Party way.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'A')nyway, I'll vote for containerized shipping and computer networks.

Capital has from day one arbitraged labor - paying less for labor than the labor produced is the definition of profit. America was founded by capitalists exporting labor to exploit the resources here. The New England mills were imported from Olde England before they were exported to the south until they were outsourced to Asia.

[Pops]

Detroit is the perfect example of free markets.

Capital eliminated labor to the extent possible and when that was not profitable enough it moved to where labor was cheaper, unorganized and desperate for a job.

How can a market get any freer than that?

The problem of course is that in the process it also eliminated it's customers.


The ownership class sees class war on wage earners as a good thing because it increases profit. The problem being, since owners won not only the war to bust unions etc and cap wages at the level of the 1970s, they also won the war to reduce their tax liability, which of course kinda leads us to where we are today.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he capitalists’ all out assault to reduce direct and indirect wages was highly successful (and involved trade union busting, outsourcing, offshoring and eventually globalization). As a result, real wages started to stagnate since the seventies. This situation worsened as public expenditures that were important for the reproduction of the labor force were cut and condemned. Increased indebtedness (and a higher debt burden) ensued as wages stopped being the key reference for the reproduction of the proletariat.

Eventually, profit rates recovered. But by the late eighties, the institutions that had supported the previous wage norm (the period of Keynesianism) had been destroyed. Capitalists had been extremely successful and had no interest in restoring those institutions. The degree of their success can be gauged by the magnitude of today’s crisis. In this framework, class struggle sets the stage for indebtedness and plants the seed for the current financial crisis.

[noobtube]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fishman', 'P')ops, sorry to have to disagree with you again, but Detroit is pure Democratic, if it fails its clear who is the cause. The question with peak oil will be who best leads us down the slope. Detroit is a perfect example of post peak oil,/carbon reduction/ downsizing done the Democratic Party way.

[Revi]

Plantagenet asked:

"Can someone please answer the question?

When do you think heavy industry, and specifically the bloody automobile industry, will die? Will it be dead by 2015? 2020? 2030? When exactly?"

They are dead already. Remember? They have been on life support since the big auto bailout. Tell me they are making money now. Really? The car companies are all being supported by governments all over the world. They are like the railroads were at the beginning of the 20th century. Cars will still be around, but they are already obsolete. Better to invest in drones or iphones or something.

[Cloud9]

Detroit is what happens when a system that is built on exponential growth comes into contact with limits. We can blame crony capitalism, corruption, unions, and even nepotism, but the bottom line is we are on the back slope of peak oil. The water is draining out of the pool and to steal a line from Nassim Taleb, it’s becoming apparent who went into the water without any cloths.

[Pops]

I see Detroit is more an artifact of "progress" rather than of decline. Like pstarr said initially, car manufacture has moved on. The great lakes were the transport hub of the past and the fact that the car business grew up in Detroit made it the logical center of the car business - until transportation became less of a constraint than labor.

Not everyone thinks globalization is keen or even progress but there is no doubt that it has made products cheaper and it has definitely made Detroit shrink.

I wonder what would be an alternative to Detroit as the city best epitomizing the post-peak world?

[Newfie]

I sure don't want to get into this Blue/Red argument but I have to wonder, is there some larger lesson to be learned here?

I'm not so much interested in WHY it failed but HOW it went down? Don't care much for blame, how do we deal with the reality?

I expect many of our cities to fail in the future. It would be interesting and informative to know more about what the trip down the sewer was like for those living there.

Any insights?

[Pops]

I think a person could look at any hamlet or ag focused small town, at least in America and see exactly the same story. Good roads, cheap transportation and no jobs sent people elsewhere.

In Detroit, cheap transportation enabled cheap labor and once the good jobs at union scale left, the small business and the menial jobs at minimum wage dried up as well.

In the small ag towns were all the trades necessary to keep the farm and the town itself running, from shoes to silos and at some scale the shoe salesmen and silo operators too. But once the migration to town jobs (in Detroit) started and then the small diversified farms became unprofitable and the remaining inhabitants started to commute and spend money in the city the little towns dried up.

The rust belt town is a duplicate of the corn belt town 30 years before. Both succumbed to cheap transportation, geographic specialization and labor arbitrage.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I') sure don't want to get into this Blue/Red argument but I have to wonder, is there some larger lesson to be learned here?

I'm not so much interested in WHY it failed but HOW it went down? Don't care much for blame, how do we deal with the reality?

I expect many of our cities to fail in the future. It would be interesting and informative to know more about what the trip down the sewer was like for those living there.

Any insights?

[Lore]

Fear not, Governer Rick Snyder is busy trying to push in one of his chosen Gestapo like emergency managers there to sell off what's left of the assets from a former great US city that use to represented the nations middle class.

Detroit has the smell of death. A precursor and warning to the rest of the country. You don't have to ask why it happened there because now it's happening everywhere.

[SamInNebraska]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', '
')
Detroit has the smell of death. A precursor and warning to the rest of the country. You don't have to ask why it happened there because now it's happening everywhere.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SamInNebraska', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', '
')
Detroit has the smell of death. A precursor and warning to the rest of the country. You don't have to ask why it happened there because now it's happening everywhere.

[The Practician]

Steve over at Economic Undertow recently did a series of Posts centered around Detroit. well worth a read although you might want to space them out. the links are in order of first to last.

http://www.economic-undertow.com/2012/1 ... -business/

http://www.economic-undertow.com/2012/1 ... g-economy/

http://www.economic-undertow.com/2012/12/15/model-city/

[Newfie]

Thanks Tanda,

I have lived or worked in Phila. Since 78. Back then I got around the city more because I worked maintenance jobs or construction. Now I work in an office building and walk to work.

It appears to me that the slums are not as bad as they were back then. But they have pulled down a lot of old houses. I think we have around 40,000 vacant houses here. The high rises went down, and it is funny to see the little suburban style houses taking their place. We live in an 1887 house in a good neighborhood were crime is low.

Murder rate is pretty high, but not so bad as 20 years ago. Crime seems to be on the wane. But someone tried to break into our house about a month ago, eleven o'clock at night and we were n bed. Kinda freaky.

There is almost no manufacturing base in Philly. In the 70's there would be soot on my desk if I left a window open overnight, no more. A good thing?

There are almost no real jobs, just workfare service jobs. Insurance clerks, lawyers, consultants, and other service related non jobs. One wonders how such a behemoth can exist, it produces nothing. Thus it has no reason for existence. But that is true for most of the country.

Because I do live in a center city area I worry about the decay and how it will effect us. Righ now we are doing well. We live in a good neighborhood, not hit bad by housing crisis, rents are up (we rent out three apts in our house) things are stable or improving.

But I wonder how long that all can last and how quick it can fall.

[Shaved Monkey]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I') see Detroit is more an artifact of "progress" rather than of decline.
I wonder what would be an alternative to Detroit as the city best epitomizing the post-peak world?

[Newfie]

No,Havana is in better shape because you don't need heat, and have a 365 growing season.

You can't do in Detroit what they did in Havana.

Apples and oranges.

[jdmartin]

Tanada, thanks for the excellent writeup on your memories of Detroit. It was really interesting to read about Detroit at the end of its heyday.

Detroit's problems are just a mirror of those of the United States as a whole. Yes, some problems are self-inflicted by corrupt political administration, sweetheart union deals, etc. But the bottom line is that when manufacturing left the United States, the money left with it. That is going to create winners and losers. The corporatocracy, China, Vietnam, were the winners. Most of the United States was the losers, and some worse than others. Detroit had more manufacturing to lose, so it should be no surprise it's one of the biggest losers.

I think some of the ideas of contracting the city are pretty interesting. One in particular is advocating creating thousands of acres of greenhouses to produce food year-round. A roundabout return to agriculture, but why not? Land that's sitting vacant is only costing the city money.