Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

[Mega]

Good Eveing Ladies & Gents
I thought this being Xmas day it might be an idea to post something to remind us of JUST how lucky we are:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz_vDOrqOOQ

I heard & read quite a bit about Detriot, Michael More & Clarkson both have filmed & written about its decline to de-industration. Watching it made me think, if the relocation of the Car plants lead to this,....then what will the end of most of F.I.R.E......... Do to New York/Wall st/...........Will we see abandoned Skyscrappers?.......Will the one time Penthouse office used in Mega wall st deals end up being used by Street scum to deal drugs?

Escape from New York?
Mike

[D-Mack]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

I've read something about Hoboken recently

Washington Post looks at the relationship between Hoboken and Wall Street
by Carly
Saturday December 13, 2008, 2:05 PM
"When Wall Street sneezes, Hoboken catches cold."

So says Jonathan Gordon in an article about Hoboken and the financial meltdown in today's Washington Post. Gordon is profiled as a former Hoboken resident who had to leave town after he was laid off from his job when Bear Stearns was taken over by J.P. Morgan Chase.

With so many in Hoboken who work in the financial services sector, many in town are bracing for lay-offs in the economic downturn.

....

The WaPo article reminds me an eerie prediction a Hoboken man (who'd just lost his job at Citibank) told me in April of 2008: "A severe recession is going to hit Hoboken ... Half this town works on Wall Street. It's going to be a bloodbath."

...

[Mega]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

You know "Its Coming":-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfH...eature=related
Mike

[D-Mack]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

You know "Its Coming":-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfH...eature=related
Mike

I never finished watching the movie, and I first realised the symbolism like the code 666 and the cigarettes named "American Spirit"

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

- Abraham Lincoln

[Scott4139]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Please don't tell me you believe the M.Moore stuff. There's enough real news to keep you up at night without his buying his agenda

[D-Mack]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Please don't tell me you believe the M.Moore stuff. There's enough real news to keep you up at night without his buying his agenda

What is his agenda ? gun-control, healthcare stuff

I have the feeling that he is afraid of hard questions.

Sure he made his 911 film, but when firefighters came to him and told him about explosions, where is he then ?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99446820879166 (around 6 minutes)

[Glenn Black]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Good catch, Mega.

Very enlightening video, recommended to all so they can better understand.

I think it is summed up by the statement that the teacher and their students' best idea for the blocks and blocks of vacant, derelict buildings is to knock them down, and start re-using the land for farming.

Is today as bad, or is it worse than the "rust bucket" era (late 70's, early 80's) in the Mid-west?

Wow!

[Sharky]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

What industrialization helped build, de-industrialization will help destroy.

Things have been bad in Detroit for decades -- seems like a glance into the future of the rest of America if things don't change direction soon.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

We labor under theories of economics based on assumptions of scarcities of labor, production or commodities. We have an abundance of all these, and of corruption and confusion as well. The instincts of tribal man are ill suited for global economies and technologies. Like children with wondrous new toys, we can build far more than we can substain. Sometimes massive wars are the only means we have to maintain the necessary balance between production and destruction. Wars are horrible. Would that I was older or sicker, that I might miss the next big one.

[bpr]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Interesting video. There's something particularly Western about it, though, thinking about the decline of our cities as a unique thing (Detroit is the first urban ghost town), while there are places like Mexico City, Karachi, and Lagos — just to mention examples in three different continents — that never experienced the heyday, Detroit's "boom." While I've only read accounts of life in these cities, I believe that the squalid conditions Detroit has fallen into have been the norm in many of the world's urban centers for the past 50 years.

I suspect that what's happening now is similar (though on a much larger scale) to what happened a hundred years ago when the coal in our little town dried up. Our city never recovered, and as my dad says, "a depression could only help us out; we never got out of the first one."

[bpr]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Incidentally, the Detroit lions didn't help things for the folks out there by being the worst team in the history of American football.

"I guess, by records, yeah."
-- Detroit Lions coach Rod Marinelli, on whether his team will qualify as the worst ever if it finishes the season 0-16.

[don]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

This may be rock bottom....

As far as scenic ruins go, the Pittsburgh metropolitan area sets a high standard. The natural beauty of the Monongahela Valley and the built legacy of deindustrialization make gorgeous scenery out of blue-collar defeat.

Beauty is no compensation for lost jobs though. The old steel towns of this region have been imploding for decades. No place has lost a greater share of its population than Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. This ravaged, near-empty stretch of abandoned homes, storefronts, and buildings was once a storied cornerstone of the industrial age. After losing 90 percent of its peak population, today it looks more like the nightmare at the end of the American Dream.

A concrete, bunker-like building sits back from the rubble on Library Street there. A freight container has been stacked on top of it, adding living space to the building in the most conspicuous way possible. The door is marked with a sticker: a parody of the popular street art stencils of Andre the Giant’s face, but with the word “MAYOR” in block letters where the stencil would ordinarily read “OBEY.” Through that door and up a flight of stairs, a massive, six-foot, eight-inch man with a shaved head and goatee is perched on leather furniture amid avant-garde decor, fielding phone calls and drinking a bottle of Yuengling. It’s as if Andre the Giant himself has come back to life and moved to the Monongahela Valley to do advanced degrees in urban studies and interior design.

“Statistically speaking, Braddock is an outlier among outliers. I don’t know of any other place in the rust belt that had a 90 percent population loss,” Fetterman notes, on one of the countless tours he gives to anyone who will listen. He goes on, “Pittsburgh, for instance, still has an economy. So the powers that be there are trying to break the unions and reorganize the city’s finances. We don’t even have finances.”

http://monthlyreview.org/081222straub.php

[c1ue]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

Mega,

I think you're being a little unfair picking on Detroit.

After all, the UK has Manchester.

Don't you remember the starting video sequence to 'Full Monty'?

"Manchester is a city...on the go!"

[Starving Steve]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

I was in Detroit for a few days just at the end of Nixon's 55MPH speed limit era in America, and I fell in love with Detroit.

I recall a big grey fog, dark and dense, one morning--- the kind of dark and depressing fogs that pleague the Great Lakes region nearly every morning. Everyone in Detroit was driving 80MPH through the fog. All new cars, all 80MPH, all in dense fog, no exceptions, no doddlers, no conservatives, no law-abiders, period.... That was Detroit.

I recall heading out of Detroit that morning toward Chicago. We continued in Michigan for the entire morning at 80 to 90MPH. Then came the Indiana state line and their welcoming sign: "Speed limit 55 and we mean fifty-five." The whole west-bound traffic flow slowed to a pathetic 55. The cops were there waiting with radar at the state line for Michigan speeders.

That was the difference between Indiana and Michigan. That was the difference between the spirit of Detroit and the spirit of "back home again in Indiana".

[jiimbergin]

Re: Detriot:- 1st of the Industrail Ghosts !

This may be rock bottom....


Beauty is no compensation for lost jobs though. The old steel towns of this region have been imploding for decades. No place has lost a greater share of its population than Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. This ravaged, near-empty stretch of abandoned homes, storefronts, and buildings was once a storied cornerstone of the industrial age. After losing 90 percent of its peak population, today it looks more like the nightmare at the end of the American Dream.


“http://monthlyreview.org/081222straub.php

This loss was personal to me. I worked at the US Steel Braddock Works summers during my college years. Even then (1964, 1965) you could see problems developing.