Found a pretty good post on one of my new favorite blogs, Economic Undertow. Read and discuss:
The ‘Blame the Victim’ Game in Detroit
In areas where technocracy has been installed such as Greece, both the initial conditions and the failure of the process is blamed on the inhabitants. Greeks are ‘corrupt tax-cheats and lazy’. Detroiters are ‘stupid, drug-crazed Negro savages bent on murder and destruction’, French are ‘near-communists and cowards’, Irish are ‘ugly … drunken child molesters’. The purpose of the blame game is distraction while retirement savings are stolen by the establishment. The elderly ‘deserve what they [[don’t) get! The blame game hits the target by appearing to miss it.
In Detroit, the citizens didn’t chase retail stores away, they didn’t over-invest in the auto industry, they didn’t ghettoize the city with ill-conceived developments and a web of freeways, they didn’t pollute the city with lead, zinc, chromium, mercury, toxic petroleum-based chemicals, they didn’t sell the city out to billionaire developers.
The citizens didn’t pave the city over with parking lots or built thousands of monstrously ugly concrete box- buildings. Detroiters are being shot by criminals, being driven out by block busting and urban decay, losing what little property wealth they had, having already lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Detroiters have been abandoned by their country not the other way around.
The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan, why not Detroit?
Detroit’s notorious crime problem appears to be the result of lead pollution from fuel additives and manufacturing residues in the soil along with fumes from burning lead paint spewed into the air from the thousands of building fires taking place every year in the city … rather than skin color.
The black establishment in Detroit has never been able to stand up to the white establishment which owns everything important, which controls the city’s budget, which anoints various city administrations, which constantly looks for opportunities to blame blacks for everything gone wrong.
Since 1920 the auto industry has run Detroit like a coal mining ‘company town’. Most of the housing stock in Detroit was sub-standard as built: cheap frame houses thrown up as rapidly as possible on an unrelenting grid. Detroiters are learning the hard way: land use and urban design matter. The citizens did not design the buildings or lay out the streets. What charm the city once possessed has been swept away for parking lots and cheap commercial and institutional ‘facilities’. The citizens did not do this, it was business interests seeking the quick buck for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Following the Great Wave of European master craftsmen to the city in the 19th century, most of the emigres in decades following have been unskilled, uneducated agricultural workers seeking assembly-line jobs. They added little to the community other than modest paychecks and a burning desire to relocate themselves to the suburbs as soon as possible. Even in the 1950s, when the auto workers union gained touted increases in pay and benefits, the companies they worked for were shrinking, first by way of automation then by ruinous competition and business failure.
The unraveling of the US car industry has been the decline and fall of Detroit: the population has shrunk from 1.8 million to less than 700,000. Who is to live in the abandoned houses? Even without the fires and the blight, half of the ‘original city’ would be empty. Where are the jobs?
Meanwhile, the Detroiters are on the hook for tens billions of dollars of debt taken on to run the ossified city government, pay pensions, build football and baseball stadiums … arenas, improvements for casinos and retail ‘big-box’ stores. The reason Michigan keeps Detroit at arm’s length is because the state is as bankrupt as the city. If it does nothing, the city’s finance burdens will crush the state, if it tries to ‘fix’ the city the effort will crush the state just as well.
The establishment has created this mess, not the Detroiters. Meanwhile, technocracy marches over the edge of the cliff around the world ...
From http://www.economic-undertow.com
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